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."

Comments

Re:Linux package management is a mess

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

Then use a different distro that has the flexibility you want. I use Gentoo myself and while most of my system is stable, I have about 70 packages set to use the latest versions of (gcc, the kernel, nvidia drivers, pidgin, etc). It's easy with Gentoo since all of that is compiled against the libraries which exist on your system. On binary distros, there can be incompatibilities between library versions (especially as you start adding more and more unstable packages to the mix), so it's hard to keep just a few packages up to date.

In fact, it was that very problem which originally caused me to drop RedHat Linux back in the late 90s and go to compiling everything from scratch (I then migrated to Gentoo to automate things). And despite the memes, it doesn't take nearly as long to compile everything on modern hardware as some would have you believe. A full rebuild of my system takes about 24 hours (AMD64 X2 4400+, 1002 packages installed), but I do that maybe once a year. It usually amounts to 10-20 minutes a day.