Especially singe HTTPie is a python package. curl exists even in plenty of embedded systems, in many Docker base-images, etc.; but scripting runtimes like Python generally don't.

I wish this were the case. Unfortunately for us grownups that run stable/LTS distros, non-security updates like these don't usually make it to us for like 5 years or something.

There's a happy medium, and we're not in it.

It depends. How long did to take for bash4-isms to get adopted? Sometimes the update time for more basic utilities, for all systems can take a long time. (Apple switching to zsh doesn't help here.)

Except if it's an enterprisey distro, it won't get updated. Specifically RHEL 7 ships 7.29.0 and cherry-picks features (TLS handshakes) to backport to their nine-year-old version.

The exact opposite is more likely true, depending on the nature of the change. A new utility has no current usage so there are no in-the-wild backwards compatibility concerns. The system python on redhat based distros was stuck at 2 for a long time because some of the sysadmin utilities relied on it and all those deps needs to be vetted or converted to either a newer python version or their own shipped version of the runtime that didn't use the general purpose python install.

Python is a huge outlier in this case. Very rarely do you have a default tool that can't be upgraded, and this case was only because Python is an interpreted language.

Curl is a command line tool. As long as they only add new functionality, there is very little that prevents an upgrade.

There's a big difference between a bump to the latest curl version and a jump between two major versions of a language runtime. The Python 2->3 transition took years and many distros kept both versions.

Most dependencies get updated much more quickly. It wouldn't even shock me if this change got picked up mid-cycle.

Unhappily RedHat won't. Heck, RedHat has gone well out of their way to backport updated TLS handshakes (1.2 at least) to their 2013 version (7.29.0) of curl.

I'm assuming that you mean for RHEL? That's a little bit of a special case.

This is only a valid comparison if curl deprecates or moves options, as Python 3 did with language features and standard library functions.