Hi Paul W,
someone needs to get in contact with upstream and educate them about the evilness of embedded code copies.
I don't think that's a very helpful approach. The Ardour team are already aware of Debian's reservations about the embedded libraries.
Consider that the Ardour team do not want to be receiving bug reports for years into the future from Debian, Ubuntu and other Debian derivative distro users about problems which are not present in their own copies of the libraries.
It would be more productive to get the changes that the Ardour team requires into the various libraries that Ardour needs, before the Lenny release, in order to avoid creating a binary which is unsupported upstream.
If Lenny doesn't contain Ardour, then the Debian-based multimedia distros will be forced to build their own Ardour packages, which will be based on upstream's tarball. So there's no practical benefit to keeping Ardour out of Lenny over this issue, but it could turn people away from using official Debian.
Cheers! Daniel