When do smaller programs get updated?

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Specifically something like Heroic Games Launcher.

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Depending on the package, when a maintainer gets around to it, or when the automation - if any - for it runs.

For that particular package (though it’s yet more electron, which is anything but “small”, it’s probably among the larger and more complex packages, and the build system is among the hardest to work with), there is no automation, but the maintainers seem to update within a few days anytime there’s a new release.

If you’re using NixOS stable, packages are only updated when there are minor releases to prevent breaking compatibility, unless there is a very good reason to upgrade to a new major release anyway.

For that particular package, given that it’s all about third party services, I imagine updates will sometimes be backported regardless of the stability policy. This never had to happen during the 25.05 cycle, though. Minor version upgrades happened regularly.

For some packages the maintainers don’t think too hard about it and just never backport to stable, to be fair. That’s largely for packages with no clear stability policy, such as the nvidia driver.

FWIW, if you ever need an update, you can always do the work yourself and submit a PR.

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Thanks for the response.

My use of ‘smaller’ was only implying… lesser popularity/users… as opposed to ‘bigger’, such as Steam; definitely not trying to tell anyone else what is or isn’t a small job, apologies.

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Heh, fair enough. I believe this one is actually quite popular, and the number of people who maintain it seems to agree with me.

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