instead of each update being a complete copy of a working system, which would let you install them regardless of the software already present, they only contain the bits that are different from the previous version. it reduces their size, but makes it a pain to update anything that hasn’t been online for a while. it’s usually not hard to help people who have skipped several updates by combining all the changed bits of those updates into 1 package, but there’s little incentive to do so
When installing updates you are not downloading/installing the entire OS, but rather a patch to an existing OS. This massively saves space on the download, as a full is image is quite large.
However, patched require a base version to generate. Thus, to make it work on multiple base systems, you need to generate multiple patches.
Often it is simply easier to generate one and say “everyoneust be at this parent to install the patch”
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