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Linux Distributions' Tracking of Upstream Projects Examined
An anonymous reader writes "Linux distributions track upstream projects, releasing a particular version with each official release. But how far behind the latest versions do these releases linger? Scott Shawcroft did an interesting new study into this relationship between distributions and upstream projects. Shawcroft says: 'Over the last 10 months I've been working on Linux evolution research. Similar to distrowatch, I track the current versions of packages in a number of distributions and the current upstream version. Based on that data I then graph a number of metrics to understand the relationship between upstream and downstream.' His presentation on the topic scheduled for [this] week's open source convention, OSCON, should provide an interesting insight into that relationship. Currently he is tracking 20 projects including the Linux kernel, Firefox, GCC, OpenSSH and GNOME on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Sabayon, Slackware, and Ubuntu."
In Debian, all software in the repositories is frozen when a release is cut (e.g. Lenny). Only security updates are applied. If the author is going for accuracy, he should track Debian Testing, which gets updated frequently with new releases of various packages. The name "testing" is somewhat misleading. Packages in testing are considered stable enough for everyday use. The stable branch is intended to minimize updates, which is what you'd want for servers.
I am not sure if it is fair to compare Ubuntu Jaunty with Fedora, IIRC RHEL is a stable release so is Ubuntu Jaunty, and fedora is more like a dev release that tracks upstream closely. Similarly, Ubuntu Karmic is the dev version that tracks upstream closely before a stable cut of it is released. So probably comparing fedora to Ubuntu Karmic is a fair comparison.
I don't know about those distributions, but I backport packages from Fedora to RHEL frequently. It's simple, really: just grab the fedora srpm and run rpmbuild on it. Most of the time, it'll work fine. Occasionally, you might need to adjust the spec file to accommodate some slight differences, but it's not a big deal. You end up with a package that integrates nicely with the package manager, satisfies dependencies in the normal way, and so on.
Also, I'm not sure why the parent is moderated flamebait. It's a legitimate to want to run a stable distribution, but use later versions of particular packages.
I think labeling gentoo at 75% obsolete is rather crazy. gentoo gives you the choice between the stable, and the latest and greatest, and they can be mixed too. I got the newest kernel just days after it was released, no problem at all.