Future of Jill: Feedback session

[abelsiqueira]

Hi all,

As you may know, juliaup "will soon be announced as the official installer", so it is a good time to question the future of alternative installers - in particular, the one I created: Jill.
With that in mind, I would like to hear some feedback from users and contributors.

Here are some example questions, but feel free to reply with other opinions.

• Do you intend to keep using Jill?
• If yes, why? What are your reasons for using Jill?
• Does juliaup solves the problem that led you to use jill?
• how do you download Jill? curl, clone, manually?
• how do you use Jill? Using sudo? Some config or none?
• how often do you update your Julia distribution - i.e., how ofter do you run Jill.
• how often do you update your Jill?
• Do you want more advanced features for jill? Such as Enhancement: support optional mirror #23 and Give an option to change julia link among other installed choices. #62?
• Would you contribute to Jill doing small issues? Such as updating the currently supported Julia version.
• Would you help maintain Jill?
• Would you fork Jill if it died?

Also, it appears Jill just passed 0xff stars. I really appreciate that you found this package useful - or at least interesting. Thank you very much 😀

x-post:

• https://discourse.julialang.org/t/future-of-jill-feedback-session/84894
• https://twitter.com/abel_siqueira/status/1552400791868215296?s=20&t=ecAbTLKNzgyDDjKmLx2sfw

[idevcde]

Hi! Just wanted to thank you very much for Jill. I have been using it extensively for a long time at the very beginning of my adventure with Julia. Currently I mostly use official binaries from Julia Language website. However, I still have Jill implemented in some of my scripts. My usage scenario is mostly related to installing Julia on various remote machines. Yes, I am still planning to use it. I have never used juliaup so I can’t compare. I like Jill as I am familiar with it, it almost always work and is very light. I mostly use curl. I rarely use it for updates. As I wrote, mostly for installs on clean machines. This is the prevailing scenario in my case. As for the frequencies it varies, sometimes a couple of times a day, sometimes once in a few weeks. As for advanced features, one scenario I found problematic was install on Arm machines, however, I have not explored this topic in depth. I would be happy to contribute in the scope of my current knowledge (pls be advised that I am not very experienced in coding). Thank you once again.

[omendezmorales]

Hi @abelsiqueira ,
I've used jill whenever I have switched laptops, and or needed to install the newest version of Julia (that interest me); I've used maybe once a quarter or so, and download it via curl.
Until yesterday (07/27) had never heard of juliaup, but seems also a nice utility. I hope you and @davidanthoff might/want join forces, and keep doing the good work you've done so far.
Best wishes from 🇨🇱.

[mroavi]

Hi @abelsiqueira. I've been using Jill for a few years now, both on my local machine and on several servers I work with. I've never encountered any problems with it. However, since Juliaup became the official installer, I decided to give it a try. There are two things I did not like, which made me revert to using Jill:

1. I don't appreciate installers modifying my .zshrc file. Juliaup creates a machine-specific command to add its installation directory to the PATH environment variable. This is inconvenient because I like to version control my .zshrc file and the home directories on the different machines I use are different.

2. On top of that, Juliaup has its internal bin folder. This is also not convenient since I prefer the more accepted convention of having locally installed binaries in the ~/.local/bin directory. This helps not having to add a new path to the PATH env var for every program I install.

Thanks for creating and maintaining it.