Distro package support

[grawity]

What is the official answer regarding support for distributions' packages of atheme-services?

I can't seem to find that in the FAQ. The INSTALL file has a mention of "using a third party package of Services" and doesn't seem to rule it out entirely.

Question prompted by various IRC exchanges, the latest one being:

<x> I did apt-get install atheme-services
<y> you didn't install atheme correctly.

[aaronmdjones]

As far as I know, we don't have an official answer one way or the other, as long as the version is recent. That means if you get a 6.x or 7.0/7.1 from your distribution, you're on your own, but if you get a 7.2 we'll try to support it.

The best course of action is always to install from source though. This is why I set the default branch on GitHub to release/7.2 (so if you clone without a -b argument, that's the branch you get). This isn't a popular piece of software (in terms of the whole ecosystem of open source software) which means distributions tend to neglect or abandon packaging it after a while, and we, nor the distributions' users, don't generally get to control what version they decide to use, how they decide to build it and with what features, where it gets installed, etc.