Comment by david_draco

I was also put off by that, but consider the maintainers perspective: The more versions, the more combinatorics (also considering install time), which means more ways for bugs to occur. Then someone files a bug, does not give all the dependencies' versions, once you have them ... there is little a maintainer can do with limited time when upstream says "update to the latest version we released". Old versions are remembered in the git repo history of the package tree IIRC.