It's partly the amount of maintainer effort that requires; it's a lot more work to look after multiple streams of packages, backporting security fixes to some, and just bumping others to the latest upstream release. The fear is that if the maintenance reuirements become too heavy in any way, people will just stop bothering.
Posted Mar 12, 2010 10:40 UTC (Fri) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
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But they have that anyway, given that they are currently maintaining three different versions
of Fedora at any one time. Granted they would have to test more combinations if people
could upgrade one package and leave others, but I don't think that this is an unsurmountable
difficulty, as upgrading packages will also force upgrading of their dependencies, upstream
will have to handle those combinations anyway, and in any case, dealing with this sort of
combinations is not really as hard as Linux people tend to think :) (The last is from personal
experience of maintaining a large and complex source plus binary application against a wide
range of distributions.)