[IPython-dev] IPython, debian, anaconda - LTS strategy

[Thomas Kluyver]

On 2 December 2015 at 07:11, Frédéric Mantegazza <mantegazza at ill.fr> wrote:

> The question is: why, even in my debian sid (unstable), I only have IPython
> 2.x? Is there a reason for the maintainer not to use the latest stable
> release? It seams that IPython 3.x branch is out for some months, now...
>

As Min mentioned, it's not the core team that do Debian packaging. But
there's another issue: adding new dependencies that aren't already packaged
in Debian slows things down, because all those dependencies have to be
packaged and approved (new packages have an extra approval step on top of
the normal checks). As Python packaging has improved, we've been
increasingly happy to depend on many more external packages, and to split
our own code into smaller units which we release separately. Debian's
systems aren't keeping up with all this very well.

Also, since we always tell people to install using Anaconda or pip, I
suspect there's little impetus for people to work on the Debian packaging -
people who want an up to date version can easily bypass Debian.

Thomas
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