I suppose I misspoke- I wouldn't say it's discouraged, but as another comment said; it's painfully bureaucratic- it's almost too difficult for an 'average joe'

I suppose I misspoke- I wouldn't say it's discouraged, but as another comment said; it's painfully bureaucratic- it's almost too difficult for an 'average joe' developer to hop in and help patch/test their own software. I'll share my story: I help maintain a 3,000+ node Puppet config for a school district, running Ubuntu 12.04 on various laptops/desktops. Part of our config used XFCE's weather widget on a panel. A few months back, the widget stopped working, as the API's url had changed. I had tracked down the issue independently, and even found that newer versions were released for 13.10+, but alas- no backport for 12.04. I tried to investigate how to test and sponsor the package to get it backported for the LTS, but after nearly a day's worth of digging, I gave up. Conversely, on my Arch tech station, the XFCE widget was updated many times in between, with many bugfixes and other updates. > The reason is the risk of regression. I can appreciate it. It makes sense that one would want the software to be as tested and stable as possible. However, it seems a bit disingenuous to me that the developers of the various software packages are not the 'final say' in the development. Sure, the patches might only affect a specific version of Ubuntu, but as a Developer- I would prefer to fix the issues myself. I hope that makes sense- I'm not trying to paint Ubuntu's update method in a poor light, I just can't quite grasp the full scope of why it's done that way.