I want a very stable desktop, so I’m using Ubuntu 10.04 “lucid lynx” LTS (long-term support). I also want features of the latest version of git. I ran these commands to grab the latest stable git release without futzing with any manual downloading or dpkg.
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git
Thank you, Anders Kaseorg!
Distribution packages in a release typically lag behind those released by upstream maintainers. This is expected: part of what makes a release stable is intentionally not introducing changes. PPAs (personal package archives) are a handy way to get at packages not already present in the distribution/release you are using. Backports are handy too, but I didn’t see the latest git in there for Ubuntu 10.04.
Back in the old days I used to manually scour some combination of rpmfind, DAG, Dries, ATrpms, rpmforge, (and others!) to find the right packages and dependencies.