Rclone is outdated on Ubuntu; upstream is 1.69

rclone is currently on 1.69, and the one on 24.04 and 25.04 is on 1.60. Are there plans on putting the latest version on 24.04 and 25.04?

https://rclone.org/downloads/

As that package comes from Debian, you can review https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/rclone for much of the answer.

The best way to get a new deb package into Ubuntu faster is to help the Debian volunteers.

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In Ubuntu’s stable releases (including LTS versions), the focus is on stability and security rather than getting the latest features. Once a version is released, packages generally stay at their release version, receiving only:

  • Security patches (via -security)
  • Critical bug fixes (via -updates)
  • Occasionally, hardware enablement updates

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble) has rclone 1.60.1+dfsg-3, which came from Debian. It’s already received a few security/bugfix updates (hence the ubuntu0.24.04.2 suffix in noble-updates). Requesting a newer upstream version would go against Ubuntu’s stable release policy, as it could introduce new bugs or behavior changes that could affect existing users.

For Ubuntu 25.04 (which would be based on Plucky), we can see it’s tracking Debian’s version at 1.60.1+dfsg-4. This makes sense as it’s still in development.

If someone needs a newer version of rclone in Ubuntu 24.04, they have several options:

  1. Use a backport (when and if available)
  2. Use the upstream project’s own repository/installer where they provide one
  3. Build from source
  4. Use a snap package if suitable

This conservative update policy is what makes Ubuntu LTS releases reliable for production environments - users can count on consistent behaviour throughout the release’s lifetime.

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