Then I would suggest that you go to the following page: I Challenge Thee

There you’ll see who the maintainers are for debian’s elixir package and you can contact them to get it up to date. Don’t be afraid to get involved with your Linux distribution and the things that it uses. It’s because people like you care that there are maintainers for package managers that aren’t part of the core team. If you’re excited about Debian and you’re seeing something being done less efficiently than it should be, make sure it gets done.

Note that using the debian package isn’t “from source” in that it’s not actually compiling from source and it’s not “from source” in that it doesn’t come from the Elixir team.

@gon782 the OP is referring not to the official debian package for Elixir, but to the separate third-party Erlang Solutions package repository: https://packages.erlang-solutions.com/debian/pool/

Yes, my bad. Literally all of the points still stand, though. When there is an issue with third party sources for packages, it’s probably a pertinent idea to go to the third party itself, unless there is a clear indication that the third party should be an official mirror of the project.

Edit:

As an added point to all of this: It will, at some point, become important to run several different versions of Elixir. I’m working on several of my own projects as well as contracting work in Elixir and while I’m obviously free to use whatever I want for my own projects it’s always helpful to test with new versions and maintain compatibility with stable versions. On top of that it’s very important while working on other people’s projects to check that what you’re doing makes sense across several different versions as well as keeping the code future proof.

At some point, having several versions of Elixir and having folder-local version settings (1.6 stable for one project, 1.7.0-dev/master for another) will become advisable, if not needed. It’s better to come prepared for that than to rely on a package maintainer to bump versions, even if it’s someone who ought to have a vested interest in keeping up with the times.