Apple absolutely ships updated packages. They rarely ship super recent version, but Bash still stands out as the last version they ship is 3.2 from 2006 (4.0 was released in 2009).
By comparison, I believe Mojave ships zsh 5.3. Still outdated, but only by a few years (it was released in December 2016).
The version of /bin/zsh on macOS 10.14.5 is a little over 2 years old. This means they have already been shipping updates to it. Now that it's the default shell they'll probably ship updates a little more frequently (I don't have Catalina installed but I'm guessing its version of zsh is newer than 5.3).
>So? Apple doesn't ship updated packages. It never did.
The parent's point is that Apple had to do something with updating their bash userland, as they don't want to use the later GPLv3 versions.
Apple does ship updated packages (it has routinely updated Python, Ruby, and tons of other UNIX userland).
It just doesn't update old GPLv3 packages, so it was left with an old bash.
Your suggestion "if you want updates" refers to the parent, who already knows all you wrote. His point is that Apple wanted to update the default shell (but couldn't as long as it was bash), not them. Given that, the context, the homebrew suggestion is irrelevant.
Yeah, like somebody mentioned their awk version is from 2006 and buggy as hell. In Debian the packages are updated at least once in two years. In Apple case it’s pretty obvious that they don’t update anything after they changed app license to GPLv3
