rpdom wrote:A great many people do care if an update breaks their Pi.
I think one of the problems is that Pi's are used in many different ways by many different people. Some are long-running servers, some are experimental bits on a workbench, some are dedicated appliances of a sort (media servers and such), still others are a mixture of multiple uses. In some situations, stability is king, in others, it's holding things back. One can't really talk about any one case as if it were universal.
I have half a dozen Pi's running 24/7. For some of them, running stable is more important than having the latest versions of software, and others are more experimental and I very much would like the latest versions of at least a few things (especially useful for making scripts work cross platform).
I can understand why the Foundation goes the Debian (Wheezy/Jessie/...) route, because there's more stability which
usually equates to less variables to worry about. But I do wish there were some official (or just
officially recognized) mechanism for installing newer versions of select packages. In my case, I'd love to have the latest Python3. Yes, I absolutely can compile it myself (there would likely be hoops to jump through to not break things supported by the shipping version of Python3, and time spent figuring out what those hoops are). But if potentially thousands of people wanted the same thing, it'd be nice to have a way to just download packages for it (from some officially annointed site, not someone's random web page) - it would save a lot of duplication of effort.