Re: Linux Mint 19.3 has 3-year-old ddrescue!

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hello Shahrukh,

Shahrukh Merchant wrote:
> - Which version of software gets incorporated into a particular release
> (LTS or not) of Linux? Or, as I speculated above, are the software
> repository updates really independent (in their timelines) of the OS
> updates?

I guess that by "Linux" you mean "a given distribution".

AFAICT, it all depends on the package maintainer of the base distribution of 
the "distribution" in question. For example, Ubuntu depends on Debian, which 
currently distributes ddrescue 1.23, and has the packaging of ddrescue 1.25 
as a pending task (Mika, are you reading this?) ;-)
http://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gddrescue

Note that (from the link above) Ubuntu seems to be distributing 1.23 also.

In fact, Debian updated (or skipped) ddrescue 1.22, which is a good thing 
because 1.22 is one of the few versions with a potentially serious error, as 
you can see in ddrescue-1.23/NEWS:

"A bug has been fixed that sometimes marked the wrong block as non-scraped 
when running in reverse direction. (Bug introduced in 1.22)."

Apart from the above, I really don't know how each distro works internally. 
Too many distros, too little time.

Best regards,
Antonio.