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Comment by mappu | Hacker News Reader

Debian stable releases have a 2+ year lifespan so even 1.9 would be out of date for most of the distro's life.

Luckily Go is quite easy to install and use from an isolated directory, and the majority of Debian usage here would be as a target OS where the Go compiler version doesn't matter.

Also jessie shipped Go 1.3 but it was updated to Go 1.7 in jessie-backports, so you can probably expect further Go updates in stretch-backports when it's released.

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You don't need to use stable. Debian testing is rolling and only stalls during release freeze period.

I use unstable in my day to day and have had minimal problems.

Same here, my laptop as been on unstable for over five years and it's been fine.

Unless you need Debian for some reason, why not use one of the arch based distributions or fedora/some other redhat based one? Those always have the latest packages.

I don't get the question. I already have the latest packages on Unstable, why would I switch?

Does testing get timely security updates? Last I checked (quite a while ago), it explicitly did not.

It gets them with regular delay of testing unless it's high priority. See:

* https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/securing-debian-howto/ch1...

* https://www.debian.org/security/faq#testing

That's what I meant. Security support for testing seems to be documentedly behind stable and unstable.

I've had a bad experience relying on repositories for my golang install.

I'd rather manage golang the golang way.

There are a lot of ways to handle golang for Debian.

Here's a quick command to build a golang-1.8.3 package with fpm (download and extract go1.8.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz first; get fpm from https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm):

#!/bin/bash

DEBIAN_REVISION=1

fpm -s dir -t deb -n golang-go -v 1.8.3-$DEBIAN_REVISION go1.8.3.linux-amd64/bin/go=/usr/local/bin/go go1.8.3.linux-amd64/bin/gofmt=/usr/local/bin/gofmt go1.8.3.linux-amd64/bin/godoc=/usr/local/bin/godoc go1.8.3.linux-amd64/=/usr/local/go

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