Hi Paul,
About libsndfile, how about the Debian libsndfile source package is modified so that it produces a normal libsndfile library and a libsndfile-ardour for ardour to build against.
Or how about the libsndfile1 Debian package maintainer, Anand Kumria, is asked to apply the Ardour team's patches so that the new, improved version of libsndfile gets some testing before the Lenny freeze? (I'm cc'ing Anand on this mail).
There hasn't been an upstream release of libsndfile since 2006, and the last major release was in 2002.
Gentoo has had this problem recently, where their maintainer messed up their ebuild (using SYSLIBS) to produce a crash-on-startup version of ardour. Who do you think got to clean that up, us or the "packager" ?Normally I would assume the packager did, but I guess from your tone that you had to deal with it.
I believe the problem is that Debian packages of Ardour end up in Debian-derived distributions, most of which are used by people who aren't DD's and don't use bugs.debian.org. These users are likely to assume any problems they encounter are in the Ardour source, rather than a result of the build or packaging process. Therefore they take their bug reports upstream to the Ardour or distro forums, if they bother to report the problem at all.
Cheers! Daniel