stable channel has not advanced past 2.1.236 since Aug 19, against a documented cadence of about one week

Related context found after filing.

#91345 is the user-facing symptom: stable 2.1.236 gets claude_code_version_too_old for Fable 5.1, which needs 2.1.251 or newer.

The hold may be deliberate. #89651 reports a prompt-caching regression since 2.1.237. #88105 reports that 2.1.237 shipped incomplete.

If the hold is deliberate, the remaining ask is visibility. Please surface long holds so stable users can tell a hold from a stall.

What's going on here? We have one of the market leaders, yet we can't manage to maintain a stable release for the advertised flagship models? I am visibly confused.

Same here, and the gap is now 26 days: Debian 13 (trixie) LXC, amd64, stable apt channel, still on 2.1.236-1 as of 2026-09-14.

$ apt-cache policy claude-code
  Installed: 2.1.236-1
  Candidate: 2.1.236-1

$ grep -E '^(Date|Valid-Until):' /var/lib/apt/lists/*claude*InRelease
Date: Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:41:16 +0000

$ base=https://downloads.claude.ai/claude-code/apt
$ for ch in stable latest; do
    echo "== $ch =="
    curl -fsSL "$base/$ch/dists/$ch/main/binary-amd64/Packages" \
      | grep '^Version:' | sort -V | tail -3
  done
== stable ==
Version: 2.1.228-1
Version: 2.1.231-1
Version: 2.1.236-1
== latest ==
Version: 2.1.268-1
Version: 2.1.269-1
Version: 2.1.270-1

$ curl -fsSL https://downloads.claude.ai/claude-code-releases/stable; echo
2.1.236
$ curl -fsSL https://downloads.claude.ai/claude-code-releases/latest; echo
2.1.270

No local holds, no pinning on claude-code.

One detail that narrows this down: the release feed and the apt index agree. claude-code-releases/stable returns 2.1.236, which is exactly what the apt repository serves. The Debian publishing side is therefore consistent with its input, and whatever is stuck sits upstream of it, in the promotion of releases into the stable channel itself. That should save someone a look at the apt job.

Worth connecting this to #91345, which reports 2.1.236 getting a 400 back from the API with "version 2.1.251 or newer is required" for current models. That moves this out of the "behind on features" category: stable now sits below the minimum version the service itself enforces. Everyone who followed the documented Linux package-manager install is running a client the API rejects for some models, while their package manager reports no pending upgrade.

A separate observation on why the stall is so quiet: the stable InRelease carries no Valid-Until. Debian's own archive sets one and regenerates the file on a schedule, so a publisher that stops updating eventually produces a loud apt error rather than silence. Adding one here would not catch a healthy pipeline with stuck promotion, but it would catch a frozen index like this one — the file has not been regenerated since 2026-09-01 and apt currently has no way to say so.

Seconding the request from the original post: if 2.1.236 is an intentional hold over a regression, please surface it in the changelog or in the release feed. From the outside, a deliberate hold and a stalled promotion are indistinguishable.