Donn wrote:
Thanks Joshua. I guess the main question us (l)users :) are asking is how and when do official releases of inkscape get into the major Linux repos?
Usually there is a person being the maintainer of the package for each distro. This is often a volunteer, doing it in his spare time and he may maintain a lot of other packages (read: have a little free time).
I don't code OSS so I have no idea. Is it a volunteer responsibility of a member of the OSS team? Is it a thing that a Debian/Ubuntu "official" has to do - come asking for a release? Is it because they take a certain amount of time to check the release first?
The maintainer have to notice first the release (if he is a volunteer working in his spare time it may take a while), try to build it, build it successfully (this may be a problem, see your troubles with FC3), do a little testing (this may be: it seems to run but may be serious testing, depending on the distro) and push the update to the appropriate channels. This happen at each distro, having more or less communication with the upstream developers (in this case Inkscape project is "upstream").
On top of that, considering the risks introduced by the update and the required dependencies, the new release may end in a stable branch and/or in a development branch.