I’ve been looking but not founding anything about why some packages in the repository are not the latest available. The two apps I’m thinking of are Krita and Blender.
There are later versions available that have bug fixes or in Blender’s case, lots of new features, but they’re not available from DNF.
The latest versions are available on Flathub, but they have their own issues.
Is there a reason the DNF packages are behind? Is there something we can do about it?
If they are packed from fedora, there it needs a maintainer where does the work. Maintainers do the work mostly in their free time.
While flat-pack in general are made from the owner of the software. As an example Krita on Flathub is packed from krita.org.
As mentioned, Fedora packages are made from our community and depend on a separate packer.
To find out the responsible person you can watch on the packages.fedoraproject.org website.
Example of Krita is krita - Fedora Packages
Maintainer: @ngompa . I do know him as a very busy person helping on several projects.
Yes, sometimes sponsor a packer can motivate to keep up faster with upstream.
Some times there is an issue of backwards compatibility to consider.
If a update would break existing projects then the update is usually delayed until the next Fedora release.
That is why flatpak gets more popular every day. You can have different versions while delivering different dependencies and environments.
Flatpaks are great! But as I said, these two particular apps have their issues on flatpak. That’s why I’m asking.
You might address this issues then, probably we will find a solution for them.
Alright, here’s Krita: Rebase on the KDE Runtime? · Issue #44 · flathub/org.kde.krita · GitHub
Very minor, I know, but one I find annoying as hell. 1) Because I’m on KDE and 2) the file picker for Gnome is actually awful. Like, I can’t use the keyboard in the file extension picker.
And for Blender, I’m unsure if it works with Cuda when running from flatpak, after a little bit of testing, it appears it does? But then the render crashed on me, so I’m still unsure. 
In general, not big things, but just paper cuts I’d rather not have to deal with.
well, Fedora is a fixed release distro, so you aren’t really supposed to get new features in any package, only bug fixes and security updates, until the next version of Fedora is released, with some exceptions like the kernel and KDE packages (which would include Krita, I imagine).
They’ve been stuck on 5.2.3 since Fedora 40.
You mean it is up to the maintainer now to make the upgrade?
Please keep in mind that with any upstream change, there may also be packaging changes that need to be made. Specifically, please remember that it is your responsibility to review the new version to ensure that the licensing is still correct and that no non-free or legally problematic items have been added upstream.
I’m unsure of what that means, I mean, it clearly says that 5.2.8 is the latest (even though 5.2.6 should be considered the latest for desktop), it’s not there in the repos.