Well, there are actually three strategies available for supporting Debian distributions other than unstable:
1. official backports, contributed to www.backports.org or www.apt-get.org
2. non-official backports in a self-maintained deb repository
3. a "disciplined" mix-and-match strategy using http://wiki.debian.org/AptPinning
just to clarify possible ways of action for Frank and ]project-open[ ...
//stefan