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Comment by gammateam | Hacker News Reader

Debian also does not have anything above python 3.4 on the stable packages branch

3.6 has been dev and test since 2016

Debian stable (Stretch aka Debian 9, released summer 2017, regular support through ~summer 2020) has Python 3.5. Debian oldstable (Jessie aka Debian 8, released summer 2015, regular support through summer 2018) had Python 3.4. If you're on oldstable it's time to think about upgrading....

The next stable release (Buster aka Debian 10) is just starting the freeze process now and expected to come out this summer - Debian is in practice on a ~two-year release cycle, and regular support for each release lasts one year after the next stable release comes out. Buster will have Python 3.7 as default.

wow 3.5

I already have apps that won't install unless 3.6 is there

Sure, and those apps didn't exist in late 2016/early 2017 when Debian stable was being finalized. It's called stable for a reason. If you want a faster-moving distro with correspondingly higher risk, there are multiple excellent choices, but in general you'll have to keep up with a much faster upgrade cycle. (My personal preferences would be Ubuntu non-LTS or even Debian testing, which goes through pretty good QA these days and is a fine choice for non-production-critical machines.) Alternatively, wait a few months and the next stable release will have you covered.

Why in the world is Debian like this? Their buggy latexmk is also from 2015.

Somehow I feel like every system that I want to keep updated stays on an old version, and every system that I want to keep pinned to some version just force-feeds me its updates...

Because it's the stable branch, and it gets no major version updates for anything after release, nor any new packages, just bugfixes to the current version.

There is backports, and I've thought about maintaining a newer Python interpreter in backports (when I was working for a company using Jessie and trying to use a Debian stack for everything and sort of wanting async syntax). You could introduce python3.6 or python3.7 as a new package in backports. But it would be extremely hard to update the Python modules in Debian to the newer version, too, because there's just a "python3-foo" package for each module, so you'd either have to recompile all binary modules and patch them to work on the newer Python as necessary (and patch anything using async or await as regular identifiers....), or you'd have to introduce an interpreter that intentionally wasn't compatible with modules installed as Debian packages. (Or you could introduce an interpreter that tried its best and failed randomly, which seems worse than either option.) I'm personally sympathetic to wanting to get /usr/bin/python3.6 from my OS even if the only useful thing to do is put a virtualenv on top, but I think it makes sense to just install Python yourself into /usr/local at that point.

Re latexmk, it looks like the volunteer maintainer hasn't updated it since 2015, and there's a culture of not stepping on people's toes and waiting a while before assuming they're inactive or no longer care. But it's been updated in the development release. The current changelog https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/l/lat... has a bunch of "NMU" entries, non-maintainer uploads.

Thanks for the explanation.

Re latexmk: so am I getting the development release on Arch? I get the 2018 version with texlive-core.

Sorry, I mean that the volunteer maintainer of the latexmk package in Debian hasn't updated it since 2015. Arch probably has a newer version from the latexmk authors (and I think Arch does not have the same culture of individual package maintainers, in general).

..Oh. Wow. Do distros not care if their packages are updated for 3+ years? I'd have expected half their entire job is to make sure package maintainers are actually maintaining packages...

I don't know who these "distros" people are. Humans care. But no humans cared-enough to update this earlier. If you want to contribute to the Debian project specifically, talk to me.

Eventually such packages get removed (usually when they stop building for whatever reason). But if the package still works, having an old version of it is still better than not having anything.

Just to note: in Arch we almost only have individual package maintainers.

The Debian LaTeX maintainer was essentially harassed out of the project by the Anti-Harassment Team.

Source?

The horse's mouth: https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2018/12/msg00032.htm...

Downvoters: If you're honest, then do your homework instead of downvoting. If you're dishonest, and you're trying to cover it up, shame on you--you're as bad as the abusers in Debian.

This is 1) irrelevant, he was not the maintainer for latexmk (in fact he did some non-maintainer uploads very recently for it to update it to the latest version), and 2) not true, he was not "harassed out of the project," he was removed by formal action. I read "harassed out" as "pressured into quitting" or something. He didn't quit under pressure; his account was removed. (And he's still a Debian Maintainer, same status as me.)

> he was not "harassed out of the project," he was removed by formal action.

Ah, yes, the standard bureaucratic cover for abuse: retroactively justify it with formal committee action, by asking people to submit examples of badthink and badspeak from years ago:

		2012: 1 email
		2013: 7 emails
		2014: 5 emails
		2015: 1 email
		2016: 0 emails
		2017: 2 emails
		2018: 2 emails

Nothing wrong with that at all. Nothing to see here! Debian's a perfectly healthy project. Continue on your way.

> Because it's the stable branch, and it gets no major version updates for anything after release, nor any new packages, just bugfixes to the current version.

No, Debian stable doesn't get bugfixes, only if those bugfixes are for security issues! (or some really severe bugs)

Example: Debian's Python is still 3.4.2, not 3.4.9!

Debian was never cutting edge. If you want that, you would either have to switch your branches or change the distribution. There are quite a number of other distributions based on Debian with more recent software.

But I wouldn't want Debian to change their release behavior. And to be honest regarding different versions: Python has always been a special needs kid in this regard.

I feel like there should be a more reasonable middle ground between 3+-year-old software and cutting-edge?

True, there probably is, but Debian is pretty known to be conservative towards newer releases.

Is there any distribution besides Arch that isn't like this? Alpine is also pretty bad about this, and I haven't tried other distros in years.

No idea. I use mainly Debian but I think Ubuntu has a more aggressive update policy and is based on Debian. Not sure about RH since I don't know a lot about their package managers. But CentOS and Fedora are probably also quite up to date.

Oh Ubuntu is like Debian to me... in fact when I was taking about Debian this whole time I was actually talking about Ubuntu. Its latexmk is the one that's old.

Most of the big maintaining teams (programming languages and DEs) are the same for both distributions.

I find Nix is pretty up to date, and helpfully you can use it on top of any distro.

> Somehow I feel like every system that I want to keep updated stays on an old version, and every system that I want to keep pinned to some version just force-feeds me its updates...

Spot on.

It's not very clear, but this release is last release supporting 2.7 & 3.4. 1.5.6 supports 3.4.

I don't understand your comment. Version 1.5.6 of what?

The NumPy 1.16.0 notes say

> Support for Python 3.4 been dropped, the supported Python versions are 2.7 and 3.5-3.7.

That definitely sounds like NumPy 1.16.0 doesn't support python 3.4.

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