[luser001]

> If I want to update Firefox on Windows XP, I can do that without Windows forcing me to update to Windows 7 ... Updating Firefox on Ubuntu 11.04 after a certain (very soon in the future) point in time necessitates an update to Ubuntu XX.YY.

I'm not 100% sure about it. As it happens I run both Ubuntu 10.10 (at work) and Ubuntu 11.10. I just saw an alert to upgrade my 10.10 Ubuntu to Firefox 11. I give them major props for keeping an major package like Firefox updated. They probably don't do this for other packages.

Now wrt app updates, people have pointed out downthread that PPAs can be added to the system by clicking a specially-encoded URL in Firefox). People on Windows also do things like download the file, locate it, double click, respond to a UAC prompt etc. So installing through PPA isn't that much more complicated. IMHO.

Also Ubuntu has a software store, to which developers are free to push their updates.

In summary, what people are wishing for in this thread is to have the 3-4 apps they use upgraded to the latest and greatest versions while leaving the core OS and other apps at baseline versions. But ... the solution of using PPA (analogous to downloading the app in Windows) is deemed too nerdy ... Leading to the conclusion that the distro should take responsibility for maintain all the 10s of 1000s of packages for ~10 years. Am I understanding you correctly? Probably ain't gonna happen.

Do you really think it would be a step forward if we got rid of the huge number of non-core packages in distros and had to hunt down PPA sources (again, equivalent to downloading apps from different websites in Windows) for each program. I'm not sure.

Continuing, I'm not sure the lack of updates for old releases is only a technical problem: XP has an installed base, so people jump through ALL kinds of hoops to make their programs work there. IIRC, there are major differences in audio/video/drivers between Win7 and XP, but people (e.g., Flash/Chrome) still do it.

I doubt developers will keep their apps updated and working on XP if it didn't have such a large installed base.

End long reply. :)

[acabal]

Firefox is a special case. Ubuntu specifically updates that one package more frequently. Perhaps it was a bad example as that's one of the very few packages that is singled out for frequent updates by Canonical.

PPAs still aren't the best solution even if distros make them easy-to-use. The reason is that now maintainers have to get their software into two places: the core repos and now an optional up-to-date PPA. Additionally they must still target those PPAs to every single new version of the entire distro. For example: I run Natty because I like Compiz, but Oneiric has showstopper Compiz bugs for my ATI card. On Natty I use a PPA that downgrades the version of Compiz to a more stable one. However that PPA has not published an update for Oneiric, so I can't upgrade to Oneiric and get other new packages. What now? My fate is in the hands of a single PPA maintainer.

Or: many PPAs only publish releases for the past 2 or 3 distro releases. What if I'm on a non-LTS release and don't want to upgrade (because upgrading would bring in more unwanted packages), but the PPAs I use no longer publish for my version? I'm out of the game again.

The core problem in these scenarios is the distro model. Devs have to keep their apps up to date with the quickly-moving target of a "distro." That's just not a situation anyone should be in. The OP and the linked article explain this better than I can.

[luser001]

You want stability and a slowly-changing core system, but won't use the LTS releases? Because your app provider doesn't make updated PPA's for the LTS release. At which point you blame the existence of the distro's non-LTS releases? I think the correct target of your ire should be the app developer who doesn't produce PPAs for the LTS release.

I carefully read what you wrote, and IMHO your requirements are not reasonable: in effect, you want the non-LTS releases of distros to vanish so that app providers don't have the temptation to not support previous releases.

Maybe I'm a what somebody called a "technologist" downthread.

[acabal]

I want what Windows does: Stable core, independent apps. The entire concept of "LTS" is a red herring. It's a byproduct of the distro mindset. To put it another way: There is no Windows LTS. You buy one version of Windows and it works for a decade--a DECADE--and your apps are kept updated for as long as the developer cares to do so, often automatically in-app. (There's no Windows "app store", but as Apple demonstrates it's a matter of will, not technology, to make one.)

That is simply not the case with Linux today no matter how you frame it. And for some reason too many Linux supporters are totally blind to that because they think package managers are flawless gems of convenience. They mistake package managers for convenience when in reality they're a band-aid for a situation that shouldn't exist in the first place, and that other OS's have solved better. The OP calls this out perfectly.

[saurik]

Please do not blame "package managers": Windows Installer is a package manager in many ways comparable in scope to dpkg, which given your premise immediately disproves that they are the cause of the problem you are talking about; the issue is not package managers, it isn't even centralized package distribution systems like APT: it is that the ecosystem of libraries and protocols that make up the Linux desktop have horrible binary compatibility issues that distributions seem to make even worse through the usage of "rebuild the world and update all the dependency relationships while we are at it" policies.