A Patchy System – Applying Patches with Portage to Fix Upstream Bugs
For many free software projects, there is usually some delay between the initial annoucement of a bug fix or an enhancement and the moment when you finally get the software update that ships it. As a user, you need to wait for the patch to get reviewed and accepted by the project, wait for the change to be tested and integrated, wait for the new version containing the change to be released by the upstream, and finally, wait for your distribution to ship the new release. Suppose there is a bug fix that will be included in the upcoming GNOME 40 release, which will probably be available in March 2021. If you are using Fedora Workstation, you must wait until the end of April to get that bug fix with Fedora 34. For Gentoo users, I would not expect the arrival of that bug fix until the second half of this year, because all recent GNOME updates took about half a year to land in Gentoo. …