Comment 5 for bug 313960

> It makes it look like Ubuntu LTS is not even striving for
> production-ready status and that this claim as well as that of "Long
> Term" is but a slogan.

You seem to imply that quality and production-ready standards imply providing updates that add functionality to an already released product. That is really not the case. The idea is rather to try to fix existing bugs while ensuring the largest stability for the current users of the stable release. Introducing, "for human consideration", new functionality into a stable release is wrong: you face the risk of a regression (even if very unlikely) for the majority of users to please a minority of them. That's what upgrading is for : getting new functionality and bleeding-edge releases of software. RHEL for example apparently still ships dnsmasq-2.39...

That said we understand the need to provide new functionality for users of the stable release and that's what the Backports project proposes.