On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 10:20:39PM +, ghe2001 wrote:
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> I use XFCE4 for my GUI desktop, and I subscribe to XFCE's discussion list. I
> see lots of posts on the list about XFCE things being updated, but I run
> stable, and I've been told to stick to only Debian updates. What, if
> anything, happens to the updates advertised by XFCE? Do they go into Sid?
> Testing?
I'd recommend [1] or, for the more technical description,
[2].
In a nutshell, software (major) versions don't change in
the stable distribution unless something very bad happens.
Maintainers prefer to backport security and other fixes
to the versions already there. This is what "stable" means.
As a corollary, interfaces between the different parts
stay more or less stable. One package update doesn't carry
a flurry of dependency updates after it.
The nice part of that is that you can, most of the time,
just "apt update && apt upgrade" without much risk.
You pay for that with somewhat older versions.
When some "upstream" (as Debian calls that: in your case
it would be XFCE) publishes a new version, that goes first
into sid. There it breaks other things (that's why it is
called sid). When it stops breaking things it goes into
testing.
At some point in time (called "freeze"), the stream of
packages from sid to testing is stopped: that's when the
new stable version is about to hatch from testing.
Once that is done, the stream from sid to the new testing
starts again.
That was a very rough map, possibly with some corners
cut.
Cheers
[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/choosing.en.html
[2] https://www.debian.org/releases/
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