I run Debian Stable (woody) because I enjoy the superb quality of their software. Occasionally, however, I have the need for more recent software than the Debian Stable archives provide for. SpamAssassin, for example, is what I use to cut down the massive amounts of spam I have coming in to old accounts. Running the latest and greatest version of this is to my benefit in order to best identify recent spam. But how to continue using Debian’s wonderful APT packaging system with the latest software? I could use the unstable archives, but those usually require other versions of core system software.
Norbert Tretkowski’s (aka nobse) Backports to the rescue!

Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates), so they will run without new libraries (wherever it’s possible) on a stable Debian distribution.

What a wonderful solution.

My thanks to nobse for providing this invaluable service.