From: Randall Parker 

A lot of pieces of software get installed with the average distro. Then you
can run Software Updater or yum update or some other update mechanism to
get fixes and security patches.

What I want to know: For every single piece of software a given distro
includes is there someone somewhere deciding what out of a main tree of
that distro to include as changes to the given distro's tree for that same
piece of software?

To put it another way: Are there really enough people with enough time on
their hands (paid or volunteer) to choose what fixes and changes to make
downloadable as a standard update for each distro for each app?

For example, suppose you have Apache on your machine. You run yum update.
Do you get every Apache update for the major version you are on that the
Apache Group has checked into their tree? Or do some distros try to hold
stuff back?

Or does each distro need to make the changes compatible with their RPM or
other package format so that the package manager can know which files to
ask for as part of a given application?

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