(I'm the author) Well my main free software affiliation is with Debian -- that's why I used it to illustrate. Still, I think it's relevant. One of the difficu

(I'm the author) Well my main free software affiliation is with Debian -- that's why I used it to illustrate. Still, I think it's relevant. One of the difficult choices that distributions have to make, is to decide which branch of projects should be shipped to users (of if multiple branches need to be shipped, which one should be the default). Of course Debian is often on the conservative side of things, and also made those decisions based on its own ability to introduce patches to fix breakages. It would be more interesting to have data about which python version is supported by how many modules, over time (and which ruby version is supported by how many ruby gems, over time). But I don't think that this data is available?