Re: ROOT and repositories

I've taken the source now and I agree that it's fairly easily built. It's not done yet (I'mcompiling on a Netbook, d'oh!), so I can't tell whether everything worked but it's looking good. Despite the additional effort for fetching all the required devels and getting ./configure right (the hardest part as usual is know what you want or you might possibly need in some distant future) it's manageable, so to say.

I see your point and I'd rather stick to all-or-nothing. Those who take the time and the effort to pack it into specific packages are undoubtably doing a great job but what is the point if that only happens one in a while? You will have to go through the trouble of compiling it sooner or later anyway then.

And as for users who might use root only occasionally I think it serves them worse to be sort of ... lured ... into fetching the latest binary from the repos and then find out that they will have a lot of trouble with a mostly outdated ("release early and often") release.

--CS

Axel Naumann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> the packages offered by the distributions are not provided by the ROOT
> team (and by the way the ROOT team is not just at CERN :-)
>
> We, the ROOT team, generally have two options:
> A: encourage other people to regularly provide new packages for the most
> common distros (Debian being definitely one of them)
> B: discourage the use of distro packages because they are by definition
> out of date.
>
> I finally ended up where most of my colleagues arrived a long while ago:
> going for option B. We have seen very enthusiastic volunteers building
> amazing distro packages and making sure they get uploaded - all of which
> takes a fair amount of time. But we saw each of them only *once*. Nobody
> has managed, for any distro, to keep it up for more than one release.
>
> Summary: please ignore the utterly out of date packages that are
> available in Debian, and just download the source, untar, configure &&
> make. That takes minutes and it will continue to work for the next years.
>
> Maybe Debian should simply remove the ROOT packages. Could you try to
> get that arranged?
>
> Cheers, Axel.
>
> Cedric Sodhi wrote on 03/29/2010 05:28 PM:

>> Hello, after experiencing just the same error
>>
>> (German:) http://debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=118970
>>
>> I wondered how readily ROOT gets updates in the variety of 
>> repositories of Linux distributions. I know perfectly well that the 
>> first source for getting just about any program should be the vendor 
>> of the program ittself, but I also pretty much appreciate the 
>> convenience of dedicated repositories and trouble-free installation.
>>
>> Is there anyone at CERN who monitors regular updates in the 
>> repositories (Ubuntu, it is for me)? Is there any reason for me to 
>> hope that it will get an appropriate update anytime soon?
>>
>>