I am trying Ubuntu recently, and am disappointed to find out that apt-get delivers a lot of outdated daily software.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