...and is still stable?

All of them. This is Linux after all, you can update your distro to be as bleeding edge, or not, as you wish.

Perhaps you mean in it's package manager repositories?

I dont know which has the most current software as i dont keep track of every packages version number, but i have always found Arch very uptodate, it also has the AUR which is a repository where users can submit their own package builds of things.

Frugalware is also very up to date, it had gcc 4.1, Xorg 7.1 etc all within days of release. Gentoo is pretty up to date however you build it all from source, major turn off IMO.

There is one thing you should understand, wcboyd. Software is seldom stable and new/bleeding-edge at the same time; most often it simply means that very new software is, though tested, still buggy and not always held as "stable".

If you consider "new software" as something that's couple of days - some week old, and it's "stable" in the sense it won't crash on every step and works all right most of the time, then yes - quite every distribution out there provides you this (well I'm not saying anything about Debian). If you instead consider "new software" as something that's been compiled the same morning, it's not probably stable. Or if you consider "stable software" being something that works like a rock, never crashes, has no flaws, understands your errors (won't crash the minute you do something paranormal) and "just works", then it's not new software.

You must understand that every time software is released, it is very probable that bugs are found and fixed - that's why many open source projects have different reposities (or similar) for stable software (that is not the very newest technology, but works well) and for bleeding-edge (also called "testing"), very new software (that is very new and fresh, but not thoroughly tested and contains bugs not found at the moment). Gnome, for example, has even-numbered releases that are stable (2.12, 2.14, 2.16 etc.) and odd-numbered releases (2.13, 2.15, 2.17 etc.) that are "testing", i.e. new software but so new it's getting updated quickly and is not stable in the sense the even-numbered software is. I myself would even consider their even-numbered releases to be non-stable for a short time after the release, since updates do come soon afterwards, fixing bugs.

Anyway ethics is right; I think Arch is quite up-to-date and nice too, even if it doesn't always provide the stablest software (but it's not too buggy either). That is probably something you're looking for. I liked Arch a lot for it's package manager and relatively quick updates, the only downside was that it didn't work on some of my hardware.

Thanks XavierP for making me be a bit more precise in my question.

While we can update our systems at will not all of us have the time or skills to validate the possible instablities introduced to our systems as a whole. Me being a case in point. I could attempt to install the latest stable kernel on my system, but w/o someone holding my hand the entire way I would only succeed in making a huge mess of things.

So to ethics point, yes which distribution/package manager repository has the most up to date software?
For example Suse 10.0 has the 2.6.16.13 kernel and they will only slowly move up that chain while the most current version of the kernel is (I think) 2.6.17.8. I just looked at Arch and it does look very current. Any others?

I hardly think anyone could argue. Debian has the most software packages, and, IMO, it's also the most stable, even at the Testing level which includes very current releases.

Why Debian...A Sales Pitch

I saw this post, and your name as last reply, and i knew what was coming :P

You're the most dedicated Debian user i know

Fedora Core can be considered fairly up to date, it's really a testbed for RHEL but is a capable distro in it's own right, the only problem is the update of the distro itself is done yearly, which is a right pain to re-install every year.

Ubuntu is very up to date.

No distribution has the msot current software, for this you have to build everything from source or use the cvs releases.

At a reckoning OpenSuse 10.1, Fedora Core 5, Debian (testing branch) all have pretty much the latest release versions of the software. Possibly a few minor version s lower but still fairly recent. Suse has the very latest KDE/Gnome builds available and a number of other popular applications e.g. Gimp, Open Office. However these are unsupported, so you are on your own basically, unless you stick to the versions that came when you installed.

The idea of having the latest software is kind of pouintless in some aspects. The eay the majority of Open Source projects release new versiosn differens greatly to the way most propriatory software is released. Rather then havin huge verion changes as is the way of propriatory software, open source tend to release new versions constantly, often not containing anything new, just a bug fix, security fix or feature needed for devlopers rather then end users.