Yes!!!
The development cycle of software like MongoDB, RabbitMQ and so on, is much faster than that of Debian or any other Linux distro. The Debian package is fine for dabbling or low volume use, but for any serious app, you MUST go direct to the developers and use their latest stable release. That is what they support best on their mailing lists, and that is where most bugs are already fixed.
A lot of software development teams are releasing their own RPM and .DEB Linux binary packages for just that reason, to encourage people to use up to date packages instead of the stale OS distro packages.
In a way, it's rather like security updates. Who would refuse to install security updates because it's not part of the Ubuntu 10.4 LTS release? Almost nobody even thinks of doing that. So why would you use old obsolete releases of mission critical software?
> why would you use old obsolete releases of mission critical software?
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Because it's mission critical, and you can't afford for it to break. Once you hit a certain complexity, upgrades almost always break something:
APIs change. Undefined behavior changes. New bugs are introduced. A feature critical to your app starts performing worse. The above changes break something else you depend on (libraries, proxies, etc.)
Upgrading to a significantly changed version of a mission-critical app/library/language is a lot of work, and is sometimes impossible: many projects couldn't be reasonably ported to Python 3 if they wanted to; a lot of important libraries don't work on Python 3.
This is exactly why bug and security fixes are often backported into old versions. Python 2.5 is still receiving security patches. Apache 1.3 was maintained for years after 2.0 was considered stable.
Yes, especially with a database you can't just pull in new updates and expect them to work. It involves reading the release notes and doing a lot of testing. (much of it is automated)
Equally APIs are backwards compatible, behaviour is defined, bugs are fixed, performance is improved and software becomes more compatible with other software.
A lot of software development teams are releasing their own RPM and .DEB Linux binary packages for just that reason, to encourage people to use up to date packages instead of the stale OS distro packages.
In a way, it's rather like security updates. Who would refuse to install security updates because it's not part of the Ubuntu 10.4 LTS release? Almost nobody even thinks of doing that. So why would you use old obsolete releases of mission critical software?