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0 pointsris7y ago0 comments

> The version of AbiWord on Ubuntu was out of date and unsupported for a while

You can't blame distribution maintainers for not wanting to expose their users to a constant stream of the newest exciting quirky features the authors have decided to cram into the current release just to be able to keep on top of all of the bugfixes. New releases all also tend to implicitly have new or different sets of dependencies, and distributors have a duty to make sure these various dependencies that exist in their distribution can coexist and interoperate

Authors declaring whatever versions they no longer care about as "unsupported" is a rather unhelpful trait that ignores where their users are (distributions) and what a lot of their users actually want (stability).

I'm sure developers would ideally like to have users suckling at the teat of their latest tagged changeset and perpetually excited about the latest enhancements in each and every release. But really I'd wager that most people, of the ~20-30 applications and desktop components they use every day, by and large... they'd just like most of them to behave like they did yesterday - or last week - or last month - as long as it's reliable.

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AnIdiotOnTheNet7y ago· 2 in thread

> You can't blame distribution maintainers for not wanting to expose their users to a constant stream of the newest exciting quirky features the authors have decided to cram into the current release just to be able to keep on top of all of the bugfixes. New releases all also tend to implicitly have new or different sets of dependencies, and distributors have a duty to make sure these various dependencies that exist in their distribution can coexist and interoperate

Yes, and that is a great argument for why the unix model of applications spreading themselves over the file hierarchy and sharing everything is completely broken. Something as simple as updating to the latest and greatest version of an application should not require you to rebuild the entire goddamned OS! That Linux Desktop people don't get this is one of the big reasons there will never be a Year of the Linux Desktop.

risOP7y ago

This is the only way you can prevent having seventeen different copies (and probably versions) of e.g. libQt on your system at once. And once you have different versions of a library, there's nothing that can guarantee they they will all interpret your configuration files in the same way, etcetera.

The "year of the linux desktop" has always been a red herring. Let's leave 2006 behind, shall we?

AnIdiotOnTheNet7y ago

> This is the only way you can prevent having seventeen different copies (and probably versions) of e.g. libQt on your system at once.

How many copies of the Win32 widget interface do you think exist on a Windows installation? I'll give you a clue: it's one. This is because Windows has a defined and stable base system that developers can depend on being there so they don't need to ship their own copy of things in the base system.

Linux has no base system because that would mean agreeing on something.

jamesgeck07y ago

In this case it wasn't that Ubuntu's package lagged behind development. It was that Ubuntu shipped a version of the software a year and a half old in an LTS release.

Back-porting bug fixes isn't really an option at that point.

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