HACKER Q&A
📣 Meekro

Why do distros ship old software?


Why do the most popular Linux distros ship old software? Some distros will even go so far as to create their own custom patches to fix bugs in older versions of software instead of just pushing out the latest version. I can understand when it's the kernel and they want to avoid upgrading too often, but why do they do this for packages like Apache, or MySQL, or Ruby? Why do they call those old versions stable? Surely the latest release from the developers would be more "stable" than a 2-year-old version with some backported security fixes.

  👤 wsh Accepted Answer ✓
The main reason is compatibility, especially with application software, which may depend on specific behaviors of the versions of the system software included in the original distribution. “Stable” here refers to the stability of the API and ABI, not to software reliability in general.

Many customers would rather pay a small share of the cost to backport only the most necessary changes, in order to reduce the need for continual re-testing and updating of their applications. Keep in mind that many applications are not commercial or open-source packages with many users, but instead were developed for only one organization, which must bear the full cost of maintenance.