Updating individual packages

Question

Ubuntu 10.4 LTS

When I was using ubuntu 9.10 I installed the DDD (Data Display Debugger).

Since then I have upgraded my system to 10.4.

Currently my version of DDD is:

Version: 1:3.3.11-1ubuntu2

However, when I check the website:

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddd/

The latest stable version is:

(2009/02/11) DDD 3.3.12

So I tried to upgrade using apt-get

sudo apt-get upgrade ddd

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.

My question is, why can't ubuntu upgrade to the latest stable release?

Many thanks, for any advice,

Answer 1

The Ubuntu repositories are made by Canonical, not by the people who write your programs. So a package lands in the repository at a certain point of time before the official release of a Ubuntu version. After that, Canonical may decide to add a new version to the repository, especially if there is a security-critical update in the new version, or if a new kernel requires some packages to be recompiled. This is when you get upgrades through apt. For most packages though, development goes on, but nobody adds the new versions to the repository of the current Ubuntu version. They are often added to the repository for the next release, which is still unstable. Which makes sense, as you don't want to install the bleeding edge every day on a stable system. This stops, too, a month or two before the release goes out.

So chances are that somebody wrote a new version, but nobody updated it in the official repository, so apt doesn't know there is a new version. Your choices are: 1. Stay as you are - do you really need the newest version? 2. Try to find a repository which has the newest updates for your program. If there is one, you can probably find it on Launchpad. 3. Install it in another way (from an installer, if the program has it, or from a tarball). You give up your apt advantages this way, e.g. you mostly cannot uninstall it after that.

Answer 2

Because you to use sudo apt-get dist-upgrade instead