Why is Synaptic version of Subversion not upgradeable?

[bill walton]

On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 23:56 +0200, Markus Schönhaber wrote:
> bill walton:
> 
> > I'm running 8.04 LTS (64-bit) and installed Subversion 1.4.6 via the
> > Synaptic Package Manager.  I now need to upgrade to SVN version 1.5.
> > The package manager doesn't show SVN as upgradeable.  Has support for
> > SVN been discontinued?
> 
> No, but for the vast majority of packages there will be no version
> upgrades during the lifetime of a specific Ubuntu version in the "core"
> repositories.

How the hell is that any better than Windows?  You're saying that if the
SVN team 'certified' v1.5 on Hardy LTS, the Ubuntu team would still
require me to 'upgrade'?

> > What do I need to do to upgrade?
> 
> If you don't want to build it yourself or find some third-party packe
> source, you can either upgrade to Intrepid or enable the hardy-backports
> repository.

And spend days upgrading all the other packages on my system, and in the
process breaking the apps I'm developing on the box, requiring still
more of my time on unproductive, unpaid work.

Subversion is a core development tool.  This policy is BS.