latest-debs

Why latest-debs?

Debian freezes package versions for years. latest-debs tracks popular developer tools and publishes each new upstream release as a properly packaged .deb — automatically, within hours of release. One apt upgrade and everything is current.

We retire ourselves when Debian catches up

Most third-party repositories have a structural reason to keep you on them. This one does not. The whole point is to fill a gap in Debian's release cadence — so when Debian closes that gap, the right answer is for us to get out of the way, and that is written into the pipeline rather than left to good intentions:

• When a tool reaches its latest upstream version in a released suite (bookworm, trixie), we retire our package. You already have it; a second, lower-trust copy helps nobody.
• When it reaches parity in a rolling suite (forky, sid), we stop building for that suite only and keep shipping to the rest — a stable-suite user cannot reach sid without pinning, so dropping their copy too would strand them.
• Every hand-off is recorded in a public ledger with where to go instead, so a package that leaves never becomes a dead end.

The build applies the per-suite drops automatically from a daily parity report, and the dashboard counts them as wins rather than to-do items. You can see which suites we have already handed back under Handed back to Debian — and read the full policy.

A vendor apt repo or a Homebrew tap has no equivalent: nothing in either shrinks its own scope when the distribution catches up.

Install

The quick way — one script, ~20 readable lines, does exactly the three manual steps below (install the key, write the sources file, apt update), auto-detecting your Debian/Ubuntu suite. Read it first, then:

curl -fsSL https://latest-debs.github.io/install.sh | sh

It supports --status and --uninstall. Prefer the manual steps:

sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/latest-debs/apt-repo/main/latest-debs.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor --yes -o /etc/apt/keyrings/latest-debs.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/latest-debs.gpg] https://latest-debs.ranjithraj.workers.dev/ $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/latest-debs.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install <package>

Swap <package> for any tool in the live package list below — e.g. sudo apt install uv eza lazygit.

Packages ↻ Refresh now

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How it works

Every package in latest-debs is built by debian-multiarch-builder, a reusable GitHub Action that turns an upstream GitHub release into a proper multi-architecture .deb — no manual packaging step, no per-tool build scripts to maintain. Each <tool>-debian repo in this org is just a thin package.yaml pointing the action at an upstream project; the action handles architecture detection, cross-building, and Debian control-file generation from there.

That's also why a new tool can go from "requested" to "packaged" in a single PR: adding latest-debs support for something new is mostly writing a package.yaml, not writing a build. See the project itself if you want to package your own tool for Debian, upstream release or not.

Supported

Debian dates per debian.org/releases; Ubuntu per endoflife.date/ubuntu. Every Ubuntu suite here is served as a native build where one exists; packages without a native Ubuntu build fall back to an alias of a Debian suite with older-or-equal glibc: jammy from bullseye; noble, questing, and resolute from trixie (that package's pool/<debian-suite> entry copied to pool/<ubuntu-suite>, keeping the source-suite version token). Bullseye LTS ends `2026-08-31` per policy. Questing's own security support already ended `2026-07-01` — it stays listed since Debian's `trixie` build it's aliased from is still current.

Architectures

Only architectures at least one tracked tool actually publishes a Linux build for are listed. Device-count/popularity are qualitative context, not precise figures — there's no live metric for that; "Available suites" is live, pulled from each suite's own Release file.