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

What's Firefox?

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I run Debian you insensitive clod!

He fails to see....

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He fails to see that even the upgrading of a simple component like a library can cause all sorts of dependency issues. Not to mention that most distros follow a pattern of release, security updates, release where during the release is the only main changes in packages. This makes it a whole lot easier for maintainers to make sure nothing breaks.

Its no surprise that Arch makes it to the top being a rolling distro, that is, one that doesn't have "releases" like Ubuntu, Debian, etc. but rather upgrades the packages as it goes along. Similarly, Fedora and Ubuntu tend to release pretty often, Ubuntu releases every 6 months and Fedora releases pretty fast. Gentoo/Funtoo are very similar to Arch. Sabyon, Slackware, Debian and SuSE don't release new versions very often. I also find it odd that they are testing Debian stable rather than testing or unstable.