It sounds like all you needed was a newer version. Most distributions deliberately try to ship a version that was current at the time of release and don't updat

It sounds like all you needed was a newer version. Most distributions deliberately try to ship a version that was current at the time of release and don't update it later except for bugfixes. This is for the user stability reason I gave above. This is what a distribution release is, and why many Ubuntu users prefer the LTS release over every six-monthly release. If this is the case here, then this isn't a Python-specific problem at all. Developers have a choice: use the chosen distribution release version, or if that's not new enough, then find another way. For Python, one (commonly accepted and good) answer happens to be virtualenv. Many choose, because of their particular circumstances, to go all virtualenv and ignore distribution packages altogether. Can I guess that you used an Ubuntu LTS, so you effectively opted in to packages that are older but don't change often? Some solve this by never using a distribution version at all, which is fine. But understand that this is the nature of what a distribution is, and applies to the entire ecosystem, not just the Python one.