Newbie questions about updates

[Simon Bassett]

On Wed, 2006-08-23 at 03:14 +0200, Stegozor wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I switched to Ubuntu around 10 days ago and I have some newbie 
> questions. Here's some of them related to updates:
Hey Good for you, I mean that.
> The latest Firefox version available for GNU/Linux are 1.5.0.6 but 
> Synaptic suggests 1.5.0.5. As for OpenOffice.org, the latest version is 
> 2.0.3 where Synaptic has 2.0.2, and for VLC 0.8.5 and we have  Why 
> doesn't Synaptic have the latest versions? Is it a delay due to the 
> "debianization" of the packages, or is it something else? How much does 
> it take to make a debian package for a software (just a general idea) ?
Once Ubuntu (or other distros) go into feature freeze, they hold off on new 
package versions. After this, they USUALLY only release security fixes. 
> I've also heard that canonical provides only security updates. Does that 
> mean that to get newer versions one has to manage that himself? If what 
> I heard is true, why doesn't Canonical update its repositories with 
> other software than security updates? I'm just trying to understand.
This is done for stability. However, once you get brave, you can enable
the backports repos and get the packages that are backported. Adding new
packages constantly usually leads to an unstable system. The backports
project takes nominations for newer packages (usually from the next
version of Ubuntu) and tests these packages to verify these don't break
every little thing in the system.
> One last thing: when the new version of Ubuntu is available, will it be 
> easy to switch to it?
Speaking from experience, it is as easy as changing your sources list
and doing an sudo apt-get dist upgrade. Welcome aboard.
> TIA.
> 
> 
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