I have started to run a personal server using CentOS and I have noticed that many packages that are available to install from repository are old compared with the latest release from the developer.

I know that installing packages from repository is very easy and I guess that the supplied versions are stable and prepared to work without any trouble, but I still find odd having so much software that lags behind the current version.

It's my first time with linux and I don't know what is the "normal" thing, should I stick to whatever version the repository supplies, or try to get the latest from the developer?

To be more precisely, the repository supplies the apache httpd web server with version 2.2, I wanted to update to 2.4, so I started removing apache and its dependencies packages that come with centos to use the latest ones, but when I was about to remove pcre v6 to replace it with v8, i found out that 132 installed packages depend on it and probably it is not a good idea to remove it, so that made me think twice about getting the latest software instead of using the packages supplied by the official repositories.

Should I leave things as they are instead of going on an upgrade rampage?

Thanks