Thanks for the info Nicu.
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).
Right, gotcha.
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),
Amen.
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").
What do you mean inkscape is 'upstream'? That it is a big, official project? Well known by Ubuntu and other distro devs?
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.
I see. Thanks, I had no idea what was involved.
Donn.