Re: [Linphone-users] Linphone 3.10 and Ubuntu Linux and Debian Linux

[J G Miller]

At 15:03h, on Wednesday, September 07, 2016,
in message <address@hidden>,
on the subject of "Re: [Linphone-users] Linphone 3.10 and Ubuntu Linux and 
Debian Linux", 
Sandrine Avakian wrote -

 > We reached out to debian maintainers to know if they were interested in 
 > updating
 > linphone packages. We are currently waiting for their reply.

Are you familiar with the Debian model of updating packages?

When a new source version of a Debian package becomes available, it gets built
and put into the instable distribution "sid" (still in development)of Debian -- 
this is the
most volatile version which is continually in a state of flux.  

After a reasonable amount of time has passed and nothing bad has happened, that 
version
then gets promoted to the "testing" distribution (currently named "stretch").

When the Debian distribution manager considers it appropriate for a new version 
of
the main stable Debian distribution to be produced (about every one to two 
years),
a freeze is put on the "testing" distribution (no new updates allowed except for
critical bug and security fixes) followed by about 3-6 months of bug squashing.
Only if all critical or serious or security bugs have been eliminated is that
version of "testing" then used to replace the "stable" as a new version of 
stable.

Thus when a new version of software is released it may take 1 to 2 years for it 
to
eventually arrive in the stable distribution.  The stable distribution only gets
critical bugs and security updates, not new versions of software.

Ubuntu LTS releases are based on Debian testing and intermediate releases on 
Debian sid.

So do not expect the now latest version of linphone to appear in either Debian 
stable or
the current Ubuntu LTS (16.04).

If users of linphone want the latest version, they should either compile it 
themselves
from source or switch to a bleeding edge rolling release distribution of 
GNU/Linux
and suffer the instability problems that are inherent to htem.

And remember that linphone relies on many libraries which all have to be of the
appropriate updated version, so the problem of updating is no small matter.