why don’t debian maintainers update emacs to the latest releases in sid and testing ?

It's being worked on. Emacs in Debian is maintained by a single developer. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1009169

There is the option of installing emacs via snap, if you really want something newer desperately.

Adding, [emacs-snapshot](https://github.com/dkogan/emacs-snapshot) is an option. I believe the prebuilt .debs only work on testing or sid, but they build cleanly on bullseye, too (because I PR'd changes to support it). I've been running it for the last year or so, I typically rebuild once a month or thereabouts.

There is always the option of installing it the old-school way…

That, too.. But as much as I dislike having 500 package managers for non-specialized packages on my system, having emacs with nativecomp without TOO much hassle is quite nice..

I use slackware, I never felt truly comfortable with debian, for various which are not currently relevant, but I have more time for it than a lot of distros and derivatives. In slackware 15 I was able to download the slackbuilds, latest emacs source and build the package against the libraries on my system... it works perfectly. I'm unsure what goes into making a debian package but are you not able to do something similar... ie build a new .deb package using the latest emacs source and previous build instructions appropriately edited?

Install it via Guix! It's in the Debian repos since bullseye. `guix package -i emacs-next --with-branch=emacs-next=master` should compile it from git for you. The Guix developers also freeze emacs-next to a reasonable commit every once in a while.

Just to be clear - apt install guix and then you install emacs into your user profile. This is what I do and I recommend it if you are guix curious and semi technical.

Install from source?

Thanks for this; I usually compile Emacs from source and this seems to be a somewhat safer option and I've been curious about guix.

Looks like I need to check out David Wilson's videos on using Guix as package manager. I knew he's switched over to using Guix OS, so didn't really delve into using Guix package manager in my Pop!OS system. This could be very good for me...

Get used to an arched based distro like Manjaro or maintain a installation from source. The latter can become an issue. For example I wanted to install Python 10 on Debian for WSL Windows, but the OpenSSL-lib was too old for Python 10 and compiling such libs, is a hassle. I have Manjaro since may because f such issues with Ubuntu and Debian. It's working well.

I can vouch for guix. Easiest way I've found to get the newest version of Emacs installed.

Switching distro because one package happens to be outdated is terrible advice.

When one package makes a problem it will become a problem for more than one package. Compiling OpenSSL for Python 10 is such a case.

It is in sid now :-) https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1009169;msg=30