Just tried to run a game that needs at least glew 1.13 and was surprised that this rolling distro had a glew version from January 2015. . . Any reason not to update to 2.1 which is from July 2017?

What game?

If something is pre-built then it needs the exact version of glew it was built against cause of a bizarre ABI (it may well be backwards compatible, but not the way it's built). So basically ensuring it doesn't break anything to do with steam compatibility.

It's called Pixfight, an opensource crossplatform clone of WeeWar. I downloaded the Linux binary from GameJolt: https://gamejolt.com/games/pixfight/339608

When running from a terminal I get:

error while loading shared libraries: libGLEW.so.1.13: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So is the developer actually supposed to package Glew 1.13 with the game?

Yeah, so it needs exactly GLEW 1.13 for it to work. This is why I consider the library odd as it appears to retain compatibility, but it builds for the exact version. Most programs doing the equivalent for link against libGLEW.so.1 so that any GLEW 1 versions would work with it (provided it was late enough to have the functionality required for the program using it).

But certainly updating it to the latest release will not help make it load. Is GLEW backwards compatible? No idea.

Nothing needs to be packaged, but it's something that is better built by the distro (and therefore using the distro's lib versions). However it uses codeblocks :/