is that under Debian when someone does apt-get upgrade, they expect that the package gets upgraded seemlessly the Debian Way.
While I have no interest in seeing a Debian package of Drupal I do think a Ubuntu Server package of Drupal on reliable 6 month release cycles is reasonable.
I am not using Debian myself, but use Ubuntu too for my servers (test and production).
Adrian is talking with Shuttleworth Foundation and we should be keeping an eye towards seeing Drupal as the CMS platform of choice for these kinds of foundations.
That is great.
From the technical point of view, solving it for Ubuntu is exactly the same as solving it for Debian, since Ubuntu is just a variant of Debian and rely on them as their upstream.
Whether Debian's policy allows newer pacakges to get in or not is beyond our control. Putting the package in the Ubuntu universe or multiverse repository may be all that is needed. Here is the Drupal package info for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server. # apt-cache show drupal Package: drupal Priority: extra Section: universe/web Installed-Size: 1944 Maintainer: Hilko Bengen <bengen@debian.org> Architecture: all Version: 4.5.8-1 Depends: debconf (>= 1.2.0) | debconf-2.0, apache2 | httpd, php4-cli, libapache2-mod-php4 | libapache-mod-php4 | php4-cgi, php4-mysql | php4-pgsql, exim4 | mail-transport-agent, wwwconfig-common (>= 0.0.37), mysql-client | virtual-mysql-client | postgresql-client, makepasswd Recommends: mysql-server | postgresql Suggests: libapache-mod-ssl | apache-ssl Filename: pool/universe/d/drupal/drupal_4.5.8-1_all.deb Size: 488036 MD5sum: e2ede48b249e07b0d73a6c99082509e1 Description: fully-featured content management/discussion engine Drupal is a dynamic web site platform which allows an individual or community of users to publish, manage and organize a variety of content, Drupal integrates many popular features of content management systems, weblogs, collaborative tools and discussion-based community software into one easy-to-use package. . More information about is available at http://www.drupal.org Bugs: mailto:ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com Origin: Ubuntu As you can see, it is 4.5.8 still. Way behind.