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Comment by rattray | Hacker News Reader

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rattray·

> If you really want to install Go via your package manager,

Don't most people want to install X via their package manager?

> However, this package is naturally on an outdated version of Go

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not here - why would a package such as this be outdated?

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>I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not here - why would a package such as this be outdated?

Because of the way software is packaged in most Linux distributions. The upstream version is frozen in that particular release.

One would hope that being six to ten months behind the development branch wouldn't make very much difference. If it does, I'd argue Go isn't mature enough for general use yet.

It's not behind the development branch, it's behind the stable branch. The stable branch is called stable for a reason, because it's stable. You can still use the older versions and they're not bad, but the newer versions have brought improvements, and I see no reason why Ubuntu shouldn't package new stable versions when the Go team is committed to stability.

The Go project makes stable releases every 6 months. They are extensively tested and fully compatible with all previous major releases. But we do introduce new tools, libraries, and minor language features. Developers almost always want to be using the latest stable release of Go. (There's seldom a reason not to.)

Golang could host a PPA.

The Ubuntu 14.04 package ships Go1.2

http://packages.ubuntu.com/trusty/devel/golang-go

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