This is the way to do it. Run "apt-get build-dep git" to install the build dependencies and the set "--prefix=$HOME/opt" or whatever on the configure script to control where it's installed.

Installing parts of testing or ubuntu can serious mess up your system and have security consequences.

You can also backport the package, it's usually rather easy; you should just need to add a deb-src line for the testing repository to sources.list and then run:

  apt-get update
  apt-get install build-essential fakeroot devscripts
  apt-get build-dep git
  apt-get -b source git

The last line will download the source package and immediately compile it, generating a .deb file which you can then install:

  dpkg -i [package].deb

It looks like git 2.8.0-rc3 is the newest in the Debian archives. https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/git will show when it's uploaded.

It corresponds to

commit 312e98e283ed7f62d72bb7ac07318285f1454c78

Author: Jonathan Nieder <jrn@google.com>

Date: Wed Mar 16 18:28:22 2016 -0700

    debian: new upstream release candidate

Sidenote: I wonder how far I'd get simplifying the `devscripts` package/dependencies - your instructions will download 200+ megabytes of packages `--no-install-recommends` will do 160.

Side sidenote: https://repo.or.cz/r/git/debian.git/ is listed as Debian's upstream source for git, yet it doesn't use a valid SSL certificate...

I think this is the way I will go, thank you.

Don't do this. You will regret installing untracked binaries, sooner or later. The package manager is there to help you. Don't work against it.

Follow the other comments instead. If all you want is the latest version then pin it from unstable, otherwise install from source packages.

You can also try with Linuxbrew, a fork of Homebrew for Linux. It already has Git 2.8.0.

Because that's what Linux was missing, a package manager...

Seriously though, if people for whatever reason are content on staying on distributions with ancient packages, something like Guix is far more suited to this problem.

The main argument in favor of Linuxbrew is that it doesn’t require you to use `sudo`.