Libcli provides a shared library for including a Cisco-like command-line interface into other software. It's a telnet interface which supports command-line editing, history, authentication and callbacks for a user-definable function tree.
Not familiar with how/when any linux distro decided to update a version of an external package. The build teams may wait for user requests, or reports of major bugs being fixed, before updating external packages.
When will version 1.10 be available on ubuntu repositories?