Though it was frighteningly close, 24.04 is scheduled to be released on April 25.
The end goal seems to have been to get it into the LTS releases of rhel and Ubuntu. Since this was a valuable it's probably something kept around for when other methods fail. I doubt it would be used before the really valuable systems are compromised (rhel and Ubuntu in cloud and governments)
There's nothing wrong with Debian stable having years-old packages either. In any case:
> The current "stable" distribution of Debian is version 12, codenamed bookworm. It was initially released as version 12.0 on June 10th, 2023 and its latest update, version 12.5, was released on February 10th, 2024.
https://www.debian.org/releases/
That's just over 1 year. Sure, packages themselves will be older than that since they take some time soaking frozen in testing before they become part of stable but that's generally a good thing.
In any case, if there's pressing need for some newer packages, it's always possible to use apt pinning to pull those on top of a stable base.
> > It made it to production, for a long time
I never said it didn't make it to production. I was asking if that's the case, and giving one data point.
It apparently didn't make it into Ubuntu LTS either, so there's another one.
If you have information that proves or disproves either point, please present it.