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I am trying Ubuntu recently, and am disappointed to find out that apt-get delivers a lot of outdated daily software.

For instance, built-essentials delivered gcc-4.6.3 (seems that it is updated to 4.6.4 now, but not a week ago), which even contained a bug that stopped me from building emacs from source; I was forced to find a port for gcc-4.7.3 to overcome the bug. emacs delivered emacs-23.4 from January 2012, which lacked quite a few features that I need. git delivered git-1.7.9.5 from March 2012, which might be just fine for me since I'm only an amateur developer (and a student), but using software more than one year old knowing that new versions have been constantly rolling out is always bothering in this era. And so on.

While building things as large as gcc-4.8.0 from source is rewarding, building smaller utilities like git by myself is rather annoying since it is updated regularly.

So my question is, why is apt-get so slow at delivering essential developer tools? When I'm on my Mac, MacPorts works very well: for instance, git-1.8.2.3 was delivered two days after it was released. emacs is the up-to-date 24.3. And there is a port for gcc 4.8, though I don't use it.

Please don't say something like older software is more stable. Sure there are regressions, sometimes. But older software are generally more vulnerable. Refer to the bug in gcc-4.6.3 I mentioned above. Also, I don't think hardware limitation is a problem. Maybe there are older machines out there, but I can't imagine a machine running emacs-23.4 that can't run 24.3. If they'd like to, they can even maintain older ports.

I'm new to Ubuntu, so I'm really sorry if some of my points are offensive to some people.

4ae1e1
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  • I agree. But in summary, devtools are still software packages. – haneefmubarak May 14 '13 at 04:31
  • @JorgeCastro Yeah, it is a duplicate, thanks for pointing out :) But that 100+ upvote answer is not very satisfactory. Obviously packages do get updated (as pointed out in another answer). And the "stability" is dubious, as I mentioned above about the bug in gcc-4.6.3. Yeah, the majority of smaller packages may better be frozen for stability, but devtool as central as GCC simply shouldn't get stuck at 4.6. The impact of a single bug is just too great. Maybe the percentage of developers in Ubuntu users is not as large as I initially thought, though. – 4ae1e1 May 14 '13 at 05:08
  • @haneefmubarak Sorry, I didn't catch your point? I mean, not only devtools, all software should be updated. And the major ones should get the most attention. – 4ae1e1 May 14 '13 at 05:10
  • @KevinSayHi Certainly, but software has to be tested and verified for major errors so that nothing breaks on everyone's system. That takes time. DevTools is a shortened form of Developer/Development Tools. And the major ones do get a lot of attention. But the people who check all of these are simply people who volunteer to do it. If you'd like, you can volunteer to check particular software you want, and then it'd get checked faster. Essentially, people just check and fix stuff that they like and use if a functionality the use is lost. The people checking gcc probably don't [cont.] – haneefmubarak May 14 '13 at 07:05
  • [cont.] really use emacs compiled from scratch, and therefore didn't see the need to "fastrack" if you will, this particular bugfix. And the percentage of developers is probably a good amount lower than you thought. =) – haneefmubarak May 14 '13 at 07:08

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