Concurred — in particular it would be nice to make use of a tagged release with the stats tracking code in it.

It is a big problem especially for server admins who want to use official release with latest features

You can just install the latest version for your distro, then build it locally and manually replace the h2o, start_server and ca-bundle.crt files. That's what I did for http3 support

(/usr/bin/h2o, /usr/share/start_server, /usr/share/ca-bundle.crt from h2o/build/h2o, h2o/share/start_server, and h2o/share/ca-bundle.crt, assuming h2o is your local checkout and you're following the build instructions from here)

@LoganDark I don't think you'd like to that for each host when you have bunch of instances(and I'm not talking about creating a baked image like using Packer)

I don't think you'd like to that for each host when you have bunch of instances

If you have a fleet of servers you should know how to deploy a couple extra files to all of them without too much effort. It's only 3 files to replace. You could run a shell script that does the replacement for example. In fact if you have a list of IPs the scp/ssh commands can be used in a pinch to very easily run a shell script on as many servers as you want.