We are building our own AVRDude debs from SVN because we often need hardware support that's not present in the released versions.
git clone https://github.com/profirmserv/pfs-avrdude_builder
cd pfs-avrdude_builder
vagrant up
vagrant ssh
/vagrant/avrdude-build.bash
Soon after, there should be avrdude and avrdude-doc debs in the releases directory.
You can also download debs we've built. These debs are for 64-bit Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) but they might work on other versions.
We welcome contributions via GitHub pull request.
This whole thing is kindofa kludge.