Why are debian/ubuntu distro packages so behind on bugfix updates?

Hey all,

I’m wondering why e.g. debian & ubuntu distro packages are so behind on updates.

Major version updates of course I understand, that’s the whole point of debian. But I mean bugfix updates: 1.22 has seen 12 bugfix releases and is currently at 1.22.12, and yet debian bookworm is still at 1.22.0. I know the debian policy is “not to change stuff”, but at least if I understand semantic versioning right, updates where only the patch version changes shouldn’t really change that much user-visible behavior, except for fixing things.

Some of these bugs have no workaround. E.g. on Raspberry Pi, I basically had to disable v4l2 hardware decoding because of a gstreamer seeking issue that’s long been fixed in 1.22.8. Luckily the RPi distro maintainers cherry-picked the fix downstream.
Now I’ve run into another issue where seamless looping using segments causes hangs on 1.22.0, but it’s again fixed in 1.22.12. (Turns out it was fixed in 1.22.9)