software ugrade versions

[Mike Luntz]

Thanks for the reply Justin. I'll take a look at the references you
provided and decide, based on what I find, what my next step will be.

Mike

On Thu, 2009-10-29 at 21:30 -0500, Justin Dugger wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 9:00 PM, Mike Luntz <laptop at mltserv.com> wrote:
> > I am a relatively inexperienced user of Ubuntu and have noticed that
> > even though new versions of applications are available from developers
> > as source code, the package versions seem to lag significantly. Do
> > application packages remain at the version that existed when the
> > specific version of Ubuntu was released or do the MOTU maintainers
> > update application versions as time and resources permit?
> 
> First, see this document: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
> 
> Versions may be backported if you have time or inclination to follow a
> process. New versions can be placed in -backports, but it has to be in
> development branch (Lucid) first, for both technical and social
> reasons.
> 
> > The specific package I have in mind is Avogadro, for which version 1.0
> > was just released. The version available on Jaunty is 0.8 and on Karmic
> > is 0.9.7. I have considered compiling the source for version 1.0. But
> > compiling version 1.0 depends on a number of other applications which
> > are not available as packages and would, themselves, need to be compiled
> > from source. Although I have installed a few applications from the
> > source in the past, doing this for Avogadro seems too daunting a task.
> 
> Two commands you may very much appreciate are:
> 
> * apt-get source avogadro
> and
> * apt-get build-dep avogadro
> 
> These will get you the existing source, including debian/ubuntu
> specific patches, and install the build dependencies. That may give
> you the tools you need to build 1.0. If you get it to work, consider
> reporting this to MOTU or the Debian maintainers.
> 
> > So I am wondering whether there will ever be a version update to
> > Avogadro on either Jaunty or Karmic.
> 
> It looks like right now the only attention this package gets in Ubuntu
> is fixing build failures.  Which is fine; you should get in contact
> with Debian and see if they're working on it. If they are, it could be
> possible to get it sync/merged from Debian unstable to Lucid, test it,
> then backport to Karmic.  This may take some time, but it's an
> unavoidable consequence; 1.0.0 released little over a week ago.
> 
> Justin Dugger