As a new Debian user who migrated from Slackware, one of the few things I find a comparative disadvantage is being dropped back to earlier releases of certain programs. I spend close to 50% of my Linux time using two programs, an editor and a WWW browser, and in both cases the current Debian version is several months out of date.
The last thing I want to do is to pester a volunteer who is freely donating time to hurry up with a new package. On the other hand, it would seem that keeping up with new releases should be part of the maintainer's responsibility. What is the etiquette on requesting or inquiring about package updates, if any? And in the meantime, I assume it would be best to remove the two packages in question and put binaries of the newer versions in /usr/local/bin, rather than to just replace the installed binaries in /usr/bin?