Debian S-L-O-W Upgrading

[Paul M Foster <paulf@quillandmouse.com>]

I just know I'm gonna get flamed for this, but...

I love Debian, I truly do. Upgrades/updates are seamless. No crappy
proprietary admin tools, just bare metal and vi for configs. Lots of
little programs you don't get on other distros. Rock solid.

But... it's like a year behind every other distro out there. As an
example, I checked testing and unstable to see the latest version of
PostgreSQL offered, and it looks like it's 6.5.3. PostgreSQL 7.X was a
major update, and has been out for a while. I'd rather not download a
tarball and compile; I'd rather get the latest from Debian. But it
doesn't seem to be there.

I realize that the all-volunteer nature of Debian means that testing and
such take much longer. And that the testing results in a more stable
distro.

So I guess my question is: what do you other Debian users do to resolve
the long lead times for Debian releases?

Paul