The dangers of packaging

Start PackMan, find something useful like, say, FTPc, and download it.
Install it on my Pi.
It doesn’t work. Silently it has crashed, dumping a backtrace in its parent directory. Okay, turn alignments off and try again. It still doesn’t work, only this time it freezes the machine (not forever, but I wonder how many people new to RISC OS will know about Alt-Break?).

I rummage around and see it is FTPc v1.44 from 2006.
And at ftpc.iconbar.com is version 1.48 from 2011.

The packaged version is four releases and five years out of date. Additionally, it is a release that does not work on newer hardware.

Useful.

I agree this is one of the dangers of Packaging. With so few developers/package maintainers, who have so little time, there are always going to be cases where this happens. It should be rarer when the developer maintains the Package as well, because after the initial creation of the Package it is simple to update it. ROOL have also made it easier by providing a way to get the packages on the ROOL site.
Ideally when you notice a package that is out of date like this you should contact the Package Maintainer and ask him to update it. I know in the past I’ve missed an application update and have been prompted by a helpful person to update it.
In this case I suspect you may have trouble as I don’t think the package maintainer is active on RISC OS any more (I could be wrong).
If you fail to contact him, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do. FTPc is a very useful thing to have packaged and up to date.