People complaining about being obligated to backport Debian packages should really try lesser distributions like RHEL.

Honestly.

Being a user of Debian, I know its weaknesses and complain regularly about them. But right now we are working for a customer on a pre-installed RHEL3 (yuck) box. Not only RPM dependencies are b0rken and graphical packages managers (redhat-config-package) are utterly useless (i.e. you can't remove useless packages that trigger tons of dependencies and dependencies have to be manually selected in order to remove a package). But a lot of not-so-exotic packages (that is, for servers) are missing, like nagios, various Perl modules and ... and ... mysql-server. Yes, you have to install third party packages for all of this. And we are using an official CD set, not a warez one.

I would advise everyone to give a try to such distributions, after this, there is nothing better than feeling at home on a Debian box. :-)