To be fair, if you use an outdated rg (bad example apparently, rg simply doesn't exist in current Debian/Ubuntu stable), you only miss out on new features (and maybe minor bug fixes). But if you use an outdated package that talks to third-party web services that change over time, e.g. googler or youtube-dl, chances are it will fail, at least eventually.
The OP was reporting on the Ubuntu Bionic package (googler v3.5) [1] on Ubuntu-based WSL.
The follow-up question (not actually related) was about on the Debian Stretch package (googler v2.9) [2] on Debian-based WSL. Of course, kriegaex then ran `googler --upgrade` (I was saying this should be disabled by packagers, since it causes version mismatch between package registry — `dkpg` in this case — and actual binary) which brought `/usr/bin/googler` to v3.7.1, which is just master at this point.
I am of the opinion that if you want to stay on the latest release, you either ask your distro/repo to upgrade to the latest (apparently not gonna happen with Debian/Ubuntu, but it is very much possible with Arch/Homebrew/etc.), or make the conscious decision to install the standalone binary and use the self-upgrade mechanism. Mixing and matching outdated repo and self-upgrade, resulting in
```console
$ dpkg-query -f '${Version}\n' -W googler
2.9.0-1
$ googler -v
3.7.1
```
makes me deeply uncomfortable...
But maybe it's just me being a purist. I can see how
```console
$ apt update
$ apt install -y googler
$ googler -u
```
is easier than
```console
$ curl -o /usr/local/bin/googler https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jarun/googler/master/googler
$ chmod +x /usr/local/bin/googler
```
But of course, at some point you run `apt dist-upgrade -y` and googler is accidentally "downgraded".
[1] https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/googler
[2] https://packages.debian.org/stretch/googler
The current version (9.5) of Debian Stretch is still stuck on googler v2.9, almost two-year old. I can confirm it doesn't work on WSL.
On the other hand, `--upgrade` is supposed to be disabled by packagers... We have the `disable-self-upgrade` target https://github.com/jarun/googler/blob/ea5ca238cc2a3aad9ae2a6a3e541424c5f130332/Makefile#L25-L30 for that exact purpose... But the Debian package installs the `googler` script as is (other than replacing the shebang, which is done by `dh-python` automatically as I believe). Not sure that's a great idea.