On Mon, Oct 06, 2014 at 12:05:12PM -0700, PETER ZOELLER wrote: > Hi: > I have been using Debian for sometime and am happy with the distribution. > However I recently experienced a problem with the Gimp supplied by Debian > and contacted the Gimp organization with the issue I was having. I > subsequently discovered through this contact that the version of Gimp > supplied by Debian Wheezy is old.
This is intentional. Debian Wheezy is the current "stable" version of Debian. By stable we generally mean "unchanging"; this is a release of the operating system (and packages) upon which you can develop a product. You can be certain that, if your software or your procedures or even your users work with Wheezy, they will work with any point-release of Wheezy. Of course, the only way to assure that is to freeze the version of the packages and to only apply security fixes to them. In the mean time, though, people want to develop new versions of their software. And other people need to update their software to work with that other new version. All this preparation for the next release of Debian (which, in this instance will be called Jessie) happens in the "testing" branch. Here you'll find more up-to-date versions of packages, but because things are still in flux, we don't recommend testing to the general public - you might (very rarely) hit some bug due to incompatibilities between the packages. As a compromise, then, there are backports. These are new versions of packages which are recompiled/patched/etc to work with the stable branch. In this way, you can run "mostly stable, but with a newer version of $PACKAGE". To get started with backports, visit http://backports.debian.org and see if it's suitable for you. > How do I make sure that the software Debian supplies is the most current? > What change do I need to make to the sources list to get up to date > software? > Peter > peter_zoel...@rogers.com -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20141007084850.gb22...@darac.org.uk
