Re: Trying to update GIT in Ubuntu 18.04

[Taylor Blau <me@ttaylorr.com>]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 02:33:06PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> Matthew Glassman <matthewglassman78@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > My git version is listed as 2.17.1.  If I try to just do sudo apt
> > install git..It will tell me I have the latest version and this is
> > after running apt update.  I can not get the PPA to work because there
> > is no GPG Key to input and thus Ubuntu will automatically keep it from
> > use due to insecurity.  Can you please advise me on how to best update
> > GIT to the current stable version please.
>
> Unless installing from the source is an option, you are at the mercy
> of your distro packagers.

...especially on a long-term support release, like Ubuntu 18.04. I was
skimming through the changelog for their version of 2.17.1 [1], and I
was glad to see that all of the recent security fixes that I could think
of had been backported down to those tracks.

It's good to be on a modern version (and Junio provided some great
advice about how to build Git from source above), but if the best that
your distro provides is 2.17.1 with their backports on top, that's
pretty good, too.

> But it shouldn't be hard if you are on a mainstream platforms (any
> recent Linux certainly qualifies) to build and install from the
> source.
>
>   https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/INSTALL
>
> Using "make --prefix=$HOME/gitstuff install install-doc" and adding
> "$HOME/gitstuff/bin" early in the $PATH would let you use the one
> that you built, without uninstalling what came from the distro
> (typically in /usr/bin).

Thanks,
Taylor

[1]: http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/main/g/git/git_2.17.1-1ubuntu0.7/changelog