We're talking about different levels.

Generally, nowadays you keep a system relatively up to date using apt-get update and upgrade, pacman or yum. Back then all you had was RPM (the equivalent of dpkg).

The attitude was "you want new versions? Go to upstream, download the .RPM and install".

Now, OO (don't remember if it existed back then) depends on certain versions of (say) GTK.

What do you do?

Go to gtk.org and download the rpm.

Rinse and repeat