[racket] Possible to install both plt-scheme from repo and racket from racket-lang.org?

From: Neil Van Dyke (neil at neilvandyke.org)
Date: Mon Aug 23 14:34:37 EDT 2010

Richard Lawrence wrote at 08/19/2010 01:24 PM:
> Wouldn't this just mean that Eli would become the maintainer of the 
> package, rather than an Ubuntu/Debian developer?  I'm not sure what 
> Ubuntu's process is, but I'm pretty sure you have to be a registered 
> Debian developer to upload to the repository.

Yes, and being a Debian developer for a package like Racket is a large 
initial time investment, followed by continual support costs as people 
raise Debian bugs, and some of those need to be resolved in the process 
of periodic Debian releases.

But the biggest problem with being in the official Debian repository is 
that its stable releases are so infrequent that someone using Stable 
(which is a good idea for stability of the base OS) could be stuck with 
a 2-year-old version of Racket.  So, for these people, providing a 
".deb" built against Debian Stable, or a special Racket-specific Debian 
repository of ".deb"s built against Debian Stable, is a good idea.

For Ubuntu, with its more frequent releases and its (on average) 
less-technical users, the user being able to click in the package 
browser to install Racket would be a more useful investment than it 
would be for Debian.  If we provided this, and the user who clicked in 
the package browser gets hooked and finds they need a newer version, we 
can provide a downloadable ".deb" or an extra Ubuntu repository for them.

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/


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