J.B.C.Engelen@...1578... wrote:
From: MilesTogoe [mailto:miles.togoe@...400...] it has to do with what goes into the official repositories besides the DVD versions. Thus, users doing an "sudo apt-get install inkscape" or "yum install inkscape" will get the version in the official repository. To avoid dependency problems, only security patched updates get added to the repositories (usually in a separate security respository that is checked in your "update" program).
Nothing stops Inkscapers from having specific packages on it's own website, it's just more work for someone to be a maintainer for each version posted and all the dependent libraries that are not included in a user's installation won't be automatically installed (part of what makes a "great" package management system). Thus, it's much harder for first-time users to install.
Sorry to get off-topic here but... so the whole official repository is updated *only* a couple of times (say 3) per year with program updates that are not security patches? I find that hard to believe with the updates I was getting. Perhaps I installed a more progressive repository... (because it did install all dependencies automatically etc.) ?
That will vary from distro to distro and from package to package.
Some distros are very conservative compared with others, some package are more sensitive than others (they may touch security areas or may be dependencies for other applications) and some features are so important that people don't want to miss them.
How do Linux users get 0.46.1 ? Manually?
If the distro ship with 0.46, then one can expect 0.46.1 will get pushed as an update and installed automatically. If the distro ship with 0.45.x then the user will have to install it manually (probably from autopackage and break his update system) or *if* the distro policy allows it and the maintainer want to do the work, as an automatic update.
As we talked about Fedora as a specific example, both the users of the current release (F8, which shipped with inkscape 0.45) and the next release (F9, which most likely will ship with 0.46) will get 0.46.1 as an automatic update. But this will happen for F8 only because the specific Fedora policy allow the maintainer to backport it and the maintainer want to do the job.
Note that it will not be ported for the previous release, F7, which approach its end of life soon (probably June), so will stay at 0.45.1, but one can either install 0.46.x manually from autopackage or from rpm if he can solve the dependencies *or* recompile the srpms.