question on open source

[jonathan21]

please forgive me if this question offends anyone.why does it take so long to release new programs in the repositories.surely people in the open source community would wanna get rid of bugs more quickly.by releasing new version more quickly.

my example being thunderbird.

this question is toi get me to understand more about open source

[audax321]

Well packages that are put in the repositories are not usually maintained by the developers themselves. For example, the thunderbird package is made and put into the repository, but is not made by the thunderbird developers (at least as far as I know). Generally the packages are updated everytime a new version of Ubuntu is released. The programs themselves get updated in the mean time on the developers websites, although the packages won't be made available. I think the main reason they do this is to keep releases simple. Think about how complicated it would get if Ubuntu had to make packages for every app that gets updated during a release.

Now, if you want the latest version of thunderbird, I recommend you ditch the repo version. Just go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/ and download the latest for linux. Then, extract... you don't need to compile, its already compiled. Just run the 'thunderbird' file to start the application. You can also go to Preferred Applications in the preferences menu to tell Gnome to use that version of thunderbird by default. That is what I do and it works great.

Hope that makes sense.

[jonathan21]

thanks for explaining to me.appreciate it

[23meg]

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TimeBasedReleases

This isn't a trait of open source in general; it's specific to Ubuntu.