Certbot 1.17.0 has just been released. The changelog for the release is:
1.17.0 - 2021-07-06
Added
Add Void Linux overrides for certbot-apache.
Changed
We changed how dependencies are specified between Certbot packages. For this
and future releases, higher level Certbot components will require that lower
level components are the same version or newer. More specifically, version X
of the Certbot package will now always require acme>=X and version Y of a
plugin package will always require acme>=Y and certbot=>Y. Specifying
dependencies in this way simplifies testing and development.
The Apache authenticator now always configures virtual hosts which do not have
an explicit ServerName. This should make it work more reliably with the
default Apache configuration in Debian-based environments.
Fixed
When we increased the logging level on our nginx "Could not parse file" message,
it caused a previously-existing inability to parse empty files to become more
visible. We have now added the ability to correctly parse empty files, so that
message should only show for more significant errors.
More details about these changes can be found on our GitHub repo.
@HardcoreGames with the new recommended snap method, almost immediately. Otherwise, I'm afraid it will be more like "next major distro release" or so for many of them.
As @schoen mentioned, Ubuntu 20.04 will probably never get a newer version of Certbot as part of its base package repository.
This is because Ubuntu is on a "stable release cycle", where the packages are chosen, tested, and frozen at the chosen version for each release. Ubuntu may occasionally add bugfixes from a future version of Certbot, but in general this is only done for very serious issues. For this reason, Ubuntu Focal's Certbot package will probably stay on 0.40.0 forever.
This is distinct to Linux distributions which are on a "rolling release cycle", where the newest package is constantly updated and made available. This is the case for distros like Arch, or package repositories like EPEL for CentOS, which do not have the same policy around stability and freezing packages.
That is all why why our recommended installation method is to use snaps, where the latest version is made available immediately. You can also use the pip instructions if you have Python 3.6+.
