Perhaps something I need to understand more generically but I think this is a decent example.

Evince 2.30.0 installs as default with 10.04. It has some issues such as not being able to set a default window size and thus opening documents in random and bizarre window sizes and locations. Based on comments in various forums this is supposed to be fixed by 2.32.0.

Evince 2.32.0 installs by default with Ubuntu 10.10 so it has obviously been available for a couple of months. It is not in the 10.04 repositories and I cannot install it manually because of an unsatisfiable dependency on libcairo2. So the question is...

Should I expect that Evince 2.31.0 will become available in the 10.04 repositories? and if so, when? With 10.04 being a long term support release I would hope that basic components such as a pdf viewer would be kept reasonably up to date.

That said 8.04 seems quite long in the tooth - Firefox 3.0.5 and Thunderbird 2.0.0 are VERY out of date. I guess I am struggling to understand Canonical's concept of LTS (the info I have found on their web site is not real helpful.

TIA,

Ken

p.s. Yes I can try to update libcairo2 and whatever else it may be dependent on - I may try that in a VMWare guest and see what happens before I install in my "real" OS.

No, aside from bug and security fixes, packages are not usually updated to a newer version within a given release, so I wouldn't expect it to happen. LTS means they continue to push out bug/security updates for the life span of the release, not that they will continue to update packages to new releases. Though rumor has it Ubuntu may move to a rolling release model in the future.

If you change the default glib2 (libglib2.0-0), libcairo, etc.,
don't expect gnome and other gtk applications to work any more.
..

Thanks for the replies. A rolling release model sort of kills the concept of version release model - can't win. As far as security releases... there were a LOT of "security" related updates to Thunderbird and Firefox over the intervening period. So it seems that applications as well as the core operating system should be included in LTS.

And as to breaking things by updating the libraries behind an application upgrade - that has always been the Micro$oft way. I am getting bummed out. I am not willing to spend 3 months getting a new version of Ubuntu installed, configured, tested, debugged and tweaked to my liking every 6 months just to fix a few apps

Ken

The applications are part of the LTS system. They are fixed with security patches. This has nothing to do with version upgrades, you can fix security holes without upgrading to a newer version.

No, this has always been the software way. If you change the libraries that an application depends on (and with which it is tested) you can get unexpected behavior, especially when it is such a crucial library, on which many applications depend. This is not acceptable on a LTS version, and if you do that, I wouldn't consider that a LTS version anymore.

Exactly that is why there are actually LTS versions of Ubuntu. You can only have one of the two things, either a stable distribution, or an up to date distribution. It is up to you to choose.