Hi I’m new to the forum and please forgive me if this is not the right place to ask these questions.
I’ve been using Ubuntu’s version of MariaDB as of the days that 10.3 was the latest release, but since then it seems that Ubuntu has decided to stick with it, instead of getting to the latest. The same has been happening for Imagemagick, and we are still having 6.9 now, 4 years after Imagemagick 7 was released. I’m kinda curious about the reason behind these decisions. Would anyone give me a hint? Thanks!
With these kinds of questions, a great place to start is to look at the Debian Package Tracker. You will often find a lot of clues for what the blockers might be.
Here’s an example for MariaDB 10.4.
The takeaway here is 3 errors, 363 warnings, and the package never migrated from Experimental into Testing or Unstable. So it didn’t get picked up by Ubuntu (that’s good, it’s a bit of a mess!) Fundamentally, this kind of multiple-error in a package means that the volunteer Debian Maintainer needs more volunteer help. Volunteers like you.
Now let’s look at MariaDB 10.5:
Here you can see lots and lots of problems: Build failure, regressions, policy violations; plenty of work for volunteer help! Nevertheless, the package made it into Debian Unstable…too late for Ubuntu 20.10. Look for it in Ubuntu 21.04
Imagemagick is a little different.
The tracker page shows loads of problems that need to be fixed; definitely a volunteer-help-wanted situation.
But among those warnings is…
… and we know that’s stale because the download site for imagemagick has…
But it’s only 12 days stale. Debian doesn’t check daily. If it goes over a month stale, then feel free to do a bit of digging and then contact the Maintainer with your results. Sometimes upstreams change their site layout or made some other change that fools the Debian update script.
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Wow this is such a detailed answer. Thank you so much!
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