[thayne]

On most debian-based distros, most packages aren't upgraded to a new major version in the repos for a particular version of the OS. If a new version of postgres is released, it won't be added to the apt repos for the current stable debian, ubuntu, etc. distributions. Instead it will be included in the repo for the next major release of the distro.

There are exceptions to that, for example browsers like Firefox and Chromium, but upgrading the major version of Firefox is much less risky than upgrading the major version of postgresql.

Rolling release distros like Debian Sid (and archlinux, though that doesn't use apt) don't work this way, which is why rolling release distros have a reputation for being less stable.

[Mandatum]

That’s really interesting, does anyone have a book or blog post taking about this versioning and releasing strategy?

I feel like as a new dev there’s so much in engineering I could learn from that’s already been solved and re-solved again and again or at least addressed by existing distribution systems.

However the reading materials to learn about some of this stuff seems far and few or very niche, sitting on some cached blog post from the 90s..