Linux Distributions' Tracking of Upstream Projects Examined

An anonymous reader writes "Linux distributions track upstream projects, releasing a particular version with each official release. But how far behind the latest versions do these releases linger? Scott Shawcroft did an interesting new study into this relationship between distributions and upstream projects. Shawcroft says: 'Over the last 10 months I've been working on Linux evolution research. Similar to distrowatch, I track the current versions of packages in a number of distributions and the current upstream version. Based on that data I then graph a number of metrics to understand the relationship between upstream and downstream.' His presentation on the topic scheduled for [this] week's open source convention, OSCON, should provide an interesting insight into that relationship. Currently he is tracking 20 projects including the Linux kernel, Firefox, GCC, OpenSSH and GNOME on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Sabayon, Slackware, and Ubuntu."

Older versions of distributions?

[basicio]

I'd be more interested in seeing the statistics for older versions of distributions to see which age best, because I've been running into this problem with Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) for months now. I don't have the time or the inclination to upgrade my OS every 6 months, but even the LTS release of Ubuntu doesn't get major version upgrades for some packages I end up using a lot. PulseAudio hasn't been updated from the March 2008 version (0.9.10), which likes to crash randomly several times a week. Pidgin. Gimp. Amarok. All have very stable, very mature releases that are at least one major version beyond what's available. Now that I finally have some time I'm in the process of moving my Ubuntu box over to Arch primarily because it does rolling releases. It's going to be more of a pain to set up and keep running, but it's going to be a lot better than having to manually upgrade operating systems every six months to be able to run software that's been around for more than a year.

Re:He fails to see....

[vlm]

The mystifying part of his calculation is that Debian Lenny was frozen exactly 51 weeks ago on Jul 27th 2008.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2008/07/msg00007.html [debian.org]

Yet, somehow, the "average lag" for Debian Lenny is a mere 40 weeks, when it should approach 51 weeks as of today... I do not believe there have been THAT many security related patches, have there?

Also obsolete is the wrong word. By the definition, "No longer in use" it obviously fails by the definition of being included in the distros. By the definition "Outmoded in design, style, or construction" it obviously fails because a trivial bug fix or trivial feature add does not change the entire design, style or construction of the whole thing. Linux 0.99pl7 now that is obsolete.

Re:Linux package management is a mess

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

Then use a different distro that has the flexibility you want. I use Gentoo myself and while most of my system is stable, I have about 70 packages set to use the latest versions of (gcc, the kernel, nvidia drivers, pidgin, etc). It's easy with Gentoo since all of that is compiled against the libraries which exist on your system. On binary distros, there can be incompatibilities between library versions (especially as you start adding more and more unstable packages to the mix), so it's hard to keep just a few packages up to date.

In fact, it was that very problem which originally caused me to drop RedHat Linux back in the late 90s and go to compiling everything from scratch (I then migrated to Gentoo to automate things). And despite the memes, it doesn't take nearly as long to compile everything on modern hardware as some would have you believe. A full rebuild of my system takes about 24 hours (AMD64 X2 4400+, 1002 packages installed), but I do that maybe once a year. It usually amounts to 10-20 minutes a day.

Re:Potayto potahto

[Pastis]

It's not because you're used to another paradigm that the Linux distribution one isn't appreciated by other people

Releasing every 6 months allows me to get new _system features_, not new apps. Most of the time I already got the apps I need thanks to appropriate sources. It's easy to add sources for the few things you might want to keep bleeding edge, e.g. browser, chat, office? The rest I am happy to have it stable.

But most of the time, I don't have a need to upgrade an application. And every 6 months I am usually happy to upgrade my system.

I find it much easier to _manage_ a system when you have sources. I can even do that remotely without fear. I like it when someone has verified the compatibility of having multiple apps on my system.

On other system, it's OK to have a small application self update itself as long as it doesn't mess with shared libraries. Think installing newer MS Office screws up your IE, or the other way around. Sometimes with no way to downgrade. I don't want that on my machine.