Philosophy of which software version to include

While there are obvious technical reasons for updating software, there are very important
philosophical decisions involved as evident by the different approaches taken. Certain
distributions especially long term don't include newer versions for example support only for
Python 2.3 (2003) when Python 2.5 (2006) is current. Others distributions hope attempt to
address it by relatively fast releases. Others have experimental sections that allow cutting
edge stuff. Each of these approaches can really impact the type of interaction.