Well, why not take a look at Debians Repositories: Debian Wheezy (oldstable) was released on 2013-05-04 and is still supported. Let's take a look at two utterl

Well, why not take a look at Debians Repositories: Debian Wheezy (oldstable) was released on 2013-05-04 and is still supported. Let's take a look at two utterly important libraries for desktop usage as reference: gtk+2.0: upstream: 2.24.27, 2015-03-03 (release date) wheezy: 2.24.10, 2012-08-06 (build date) qt4-x11: upstream: 4.8.6, 2014-04-24 (release date) wheezy: 4.8.2, 2013-02-05 (build date) Both libraries haven't received a single update since the release of wheezy, gtk+2 is 10 bugfix releases behind upstream and nearly 3 years old. So no, Debian doesn't change version numbers at all (at least for most packages). And honestly I don't get why. This kind of update policy where you even don't ship bugfix releases might have valid use in special cases (e.g. some embedded environments) but Debian wants to be the universal operating system. http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/g/gtk+2.0/gtk+2.0_2.24.10-2_changelog http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/g/gtk... http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/q/qt4-x11/qt4-x11_4.8.2+dfsg-11_changelog http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/q/qt4... https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/?h=gtk-2-24&id=e6333a1a374591fef456f7fe73942226b5b8b388 https://git.gnome.org/browse/gtk+/commit/?h=gtk-2-24&id=e633... https://blog.qt.io/blog/2014/04/24/qt-4-8-6-released/ https://blog.qt.io/blog/2014/04/24/qt-4-8-6-released/