I second that. It's a definite flaw in marketing and mid-term planning.
curl | sh is a bad practice, but lack of "curl https://get.docker.com | sh" scenario is certainly bad for Podman adoption.
For some reason Docker Desktop users on macOS and Windows are prioritized over non-rpm Linux users.
(OTOH, there are some technical blockers as well, such as AppArmor support. Podman development team is obviously more accustomed with SELinux and expect some external contributions in that field)
Official guide regarding Ubuntu or Debian will get you podman 3.4.4 in case if Ubuntu 22.04 or 4.3.1 in case of Debian 12.
The project is in active development with lots of re-architecturing, deprecations and security fixes. There has to be a way to obtain relatively updated binary packages while not being tied to distribution update cadence.
Oh, that’s not a Podman issue - the Debian world is like RHEL I’m being conservative about major version upgrades. They’re still shipping Python 3.10 and 3.11, too, despite 3.12 having been released and 3.13 waiting in the wings.
The build from source instructions work and you can easily maintain your own back ports / PPAs for things like that as the standard mechanism for major upgrades which the core distribution doesn’t want to commit to supporting. Usually you can simply take the updated package definition from the unstable repository and build that, and a quick search suggests many people are doing just that.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but Podman docs say it supports "Debian 11 (Bullseye) repositories and later" - 11 is flagged as the next LTS version, with Debian 10 (Buster) LTS support ending June 30th this year.
So on the surface - if you're making the decision to try it now, at least - it doesn't seem that supporting Debian 10 is that big a deal. I guess if you've been on Debian 10 for ages & wanting to use Podman that could easily have been a dealbreaker though, but as someone looking to switch out from Docker it looks like it should be fine on the next Debians?
Podman version in Debian 12 main repos is 4.3.1 released in November 2022.
There's no official way to get more recent releases apart from building from source. The semi-official-don't-use-in-production Kubic OBS binary repo for podman and its dependencies had been deprecated in 2023.
Yeh, I guess I'm used to that in pretty much all software with Debian - you're almost never going to get the bleeding edge unless you're compiling from source.
I generally kind of see this as a good thing, in that you can assume (or at least, hope) you're getting some extra stability because of this, but it's just as often frustrating when you're missing some key feature that came out a couple years ago because the repo version is old.
