Re: Python package situation
Andrey Rahmatullin <wrar@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 09:48:05PM +0100, Martin wrote:
> Are you asking about testing or stable? Because for stable the "packages
> are either outdated or do not exist" situation is somewhat expected and
> testing is not that interesting case, though even in testing we may have a
> lot of outdated packages.
I believe there are a number of Python packages in Debian unstable that
are out of date in respect to latest upstream.
e.g.
https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=bam%40debian.org&comaint=yes
Somebody needs to do the work to update them. But maybe the fact that
nobody is doing so, might mean that nobody is using them?
The packages which are up-to-date have not been updated by upstream in a
long time, and this isn't necessarily a good thing either.
I personally found a while back that keeping these packages up-to-date
was draining far too much of my time. Time I don't actually have. So I
now use Docker+pip for my applications.
Plus upgrading system packages to fix dependencies always made me
worried I might break something unrelated that I couldn't or wasn't
ready to fix. So most of the time I don't use these packages anymore.
Yes, the idea of the packages being stable in Debian stable, and hence,
won't break anything until you do a release upgrade is a good one. But
if you encounter a bug/missing feature in such a package that breaks
your application, often the only real alternative is to use the latest
version. Often only the latest version is supported by upstream also.
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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