Update package without updating the OS

[C de-Avillez]

On Thu, 7 Jun 2012 22:45:28 -0500
Peng Yu <pengyu.ut at gmail.com> wrote:

> > So, unless I'm completely missing the boat, 'realpath' is not
> > provided in Ubuntu's coreutils.

No, it is not provided on current (stable and devel) Ubuntu. It is too
recent an addition to coreutils. You should know that, you follow the
coreutils mailing list. I would expect Quantal to carry a more
up-to-date coreutils, though (but it depends on Debian, again. Current
unstable is also 8.13.

> 
> Here is the one from my macports.
> 
> ~$ realpath --version
> realpath (GNU coreutils) 8.17
> Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
> <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>. This is free software: you are
> free to change and redistribute it. There is NO WARRANTY, to the
> extent permitted by law.
> 
> Written by Pádraig Brady.
> 
> It is sad to know that ubuntu doesn't have the latest version. It
> seems that ubuntu is completely left behind in terms of keeping
> packages up-to-date. At least for coreutils, macports (on mac) is
> doing a better job.

I am not sure where you get this conclusion.

* coreutils is a *core* package. It is not something you change
  lightly;
* different from macports, Ubuntu _must_ guarantee stability;
* coreutils is merged from Debian, so we carry what Debian has, plus a
  few local patches (these patches are why we _merge_, not sync, from Debian);
* coreutils is 8.13 on Precise. The last stable release by upstream is
  8.17 -- released on May 10th 2012. No matter what else, this is
  *after* we released Precise, so Precise does not have it;
* _most_ (not all) of the changes on coreutils from 8.13 to GIT head
  are evolutionary;
* finally, coreutils went from 8.14 to 8.17 in about 7 months, too fast
  a release schedule for us to sanely follow.

> 
> I'd hope whoever maintain the package update see if they can learn
> from macports to improve the package updateness (not sure if any
> package maintainers will read my post).

I am not a maintainer for coreutils (it falls under the Foundations
team), but I used to follow, propose patches, and discuss.

No, we will not learn that type of thing from macports. Too dangerous.
Nothing prohibits you, though, from:
(1) getting the source package;
(2) updating to latest GIT;
(3) rebuilding the package;
(4) installing it on your system.

This way you will have the _current_ GIT head installed. Again, I used
to do that, on a *test* system.

Of course, you will need to carry our patches, but the whole process
is not that difficult (I used to publish a daily GIT image for
coreutils, with and without our patches).

Also, there are other distros that strive to carry the most up-to-date
upstream versions you can use (or not).

Cheers,

..C.. 

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