Maybe there should be a slime-installer.deb package which pulled the latest from CVS -- it could provide a false sense of security for those needing it. ;-)
I see the smiley, but the issue is interesting: the _actual_ sense of security served by using debian is indeed to have software components that work together, because they were not pulled from many random places. It's not the issue of installing things by hand. But even this is not to neglect: as a newcomer, it took me some time to start learning lisp, then asdf, then this, then that, which seem to always make my initial goal more remote. I'm really convinced that lisp is a language of great value, otherwise I would have already given up and sticked to python :-)
As I said to someone offlist, I have really been surprised by the difference between lisp-the-language, which looks very mature, and lisp-the-implementations-and-the-libraries, which move very fast and require you to be rather careful because of incompatibilities (unicode, threads, networking are the one I met during my short lisp life). I think that maybe by knowing it beforehand, I would maybe have stopped trying to stick to "tested packages" and jumped in the stream more directly.
Frédéric