I read http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue86/tougher.html and thought it was good. It would be nice if you could cover installing Debian packages from source in a future article. I just went through this process and it was not obvious at first. I did this as an alternative to your method of upgrading particular packages. I didn't like the idea of having to upgrade my libraries, etc. (Yeah, I understand that I won't be guaranteed that the package will work with the different versions of the libraries.) So, I downloaded the source, generated a package, and installed it (sort of like what is done with make-kpkg with the Linux kernel). In this way, when I next upgrade my machine to the next version of Debian, I'll just pick up the latest version of the package if it gets included.