I think some distros are changing a bit here.. but it really depends on their policies. Seems Debian is using the 11 month old 0.4.0 release:
No, 0.4.0 was released on 3/24/2014. That's over two years old. Also, 0.4.1 is the latest supposed stable release and was for over a year, but they never picked it up, despite known radio-harming bugs in 0.4.0.
What they DO have is crawlers that notify the maintainer if new releases have been published. You'll definitely get more modern versions of Chirp included with distros if you publish more "official" versions. Just think.. you can run Chirp on an IBM S390 or PowerPC! Woohoo!
Sorry, but I completely don't buy this. What will get more recent updates into the distros is people stepping up to maintain the packages. The only person I see even offering to do that here is Rick.
Rick, I'm not going to maintain a separate stable branch in mercurial, which means any random release in time is the most stable until the next one. If you want to just pick the first release in a given calendar month or calendar quarter and package that, that seems reasonable and I'll be glad to try and help with directory structure or notifications if you want. That said, I don't really think there's any reason to choose an arbitrary partitioning scheme, and would rather you just script/cron the process, or do it when you have spare time on a Saturday.
Anyway, to summarize:
The automatic builds are the only official builds. Distros are welcome to pick them up automatically every time they're published, or on some other arbitrary schedule. Ubuntu users will continue to get automatic updates along with all the rest of their system updates via the PPA the day of the release.
--Dan