Yellow Dog Linux

I recently discovered the Geany editor as an alternative to using Eclipse, however, when I did the Add/Remove programs an out-dated version was available rather the the most current version ( 0.10 vs. 0.16 ).

As a rule of thumb, do other developers bypass using the Add/Remove feature since the applications that are returned from a search are outdated releases and just get the tar.gz versions that are available from Sourceforge or the software's home page ?


Also, it seems YDL isn't being as supported in the development community as Ubuntu, could this be a contributing factor for the lack of up-to-date software releases ?

Taellik

Taellik wrote:I recently discovered the Geany editor as an alternative to using Eclipse, however, when I did the Add/Remove programs an out-dated version was available rather the the most current version ( 0.10 vs. 0.16 ).

As a rule of thumb, do other developers bypass using the Add/Remove feature since the applications that are returned from a search are outdated releases and just get the tar.gz versions that are available from Sourceforge or the software's home page ?


Also, it seems YDL isn't being as supported in the development community as Ubuntu, could this be a contributing factor for the lack of up-to-date software releases ?

Taellik

No - quite the contrary. YDL is widely supported. What you're running into is the base distribution YDL uses.

YDL was based on Fedora (Core). YDL, starting with 6.0, is now based on RedHat Enterprise Linux (via the CentOS recompile). Fedora and RHEL are intimately related - RHEL basically uses Fedora as its unstable code development branch.

So - RHEL runs about 3 versions back from Fedora. See here for a chart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hat_en ... tributions

Since most projects use only the latest code - like the one you're mentioning - this can be confusing.

One tends to use RHEL for stability - the versions present in RHEL should be more stable than the Fedora versions. However - this can make building or installing tricky - since the RHEL base libraries are older too. That's why we use protectbase - to make sure core libraries don't update automatically and break.

IMHO, YDL is poised midway between Fedora and RHEL. The base foundation is RHEL, but there are a number of newer "things" present in YDL, based on some of the Fedora work.

If you were a clever developer - you'd base your code on YDL. Then, all of the distributions based on newer versions would work - generally libraries are forwards compatible.

Ubuntu is a slightly different story. You'll always find a core of developers who will code only for that since it's Debian Linux based, not RedHat. A better metric would be Fedora PPC developers - i.e. how many developers work on YDL vs. Fedora PPC?

Cheers,
Paul

ppietro wrote:If you were a clever developer - you'd base your code on YDL. Then, all of the distributions based on newer versions would work - generally libraries are forwards compatible.

From an end user's perspective, I always appreciate it when developers take this sort of thing into consideration. I'm sure there are reasons for requiring updated versions in most cases, but sometimes have to wonder if it was really necessary.

For example, I've been building PokerTH for a while now, but in the latest version it requires at least boost / boost-devel 1.36, with 1.38 recommended. Up until this version, it would build OK with 1.34 -- and I already had to provide an updated version of boost for that on YDL. And that meant I had to rebuild gnash and deluge against the new version of boost I provided.

So now if I want to update to the latest version of PokerTH (providing an updated RPM package), I'll have to update boost, rebuild gnash and deluge as well as anything else it might break. And don't even get me started on the Qt 4.4.3 minimum requirement ...

Or look at Python 3 -- you've mentioned you use Python before. It's not even included in Fedora yet as far as I know, and Python 2.x code has to be ported to Python 3. I'm guessing it will be quite a long time before Python 3 is available on RHEL / Centos / YDL. There's a good discussion on the fedora-devel mailing list regarding Python 3 here:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora- ... 00379.html
(I especially like this statement: "I personally haven't tried it yet, but it /aims/ to be incompatble, which is perhaps one of the most glaring signs a language designer has lost it that I've seen." )

So I would think if you wanted others to be able to use your application, you wouldn't use Python 3.x at this time.