> I assume that there is a good technical reason for the situation.  I am
> curious what that reason is.

Yeah.  Free software doesn't move in lockstep, and often doesn't have
backwards compatibility with previous revs as a design goal (or makes
a tradeoff that backwards compat is less important than the latest
whizzy new feature or elegant way to rewrite...  If you change an API
in a new version of the library such that your callers have to change,
you're stuck with incompatible libraries until the callers catch up.

gnome/gimp/gtk are rapidly moving targets at the moment.  Once they
slow down, packages using gtk will probably converge on the newest
version..

						- Bill