Hey Dan,
Most distros require manual intervention for this.
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:
https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/chirp
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!
There is, of course, no difference between the daily builds and something more "official". Our official builds are daily builds. Please back up your assertions. Note that fedora clearly is building automatically from our daily builds, and whenever they come out: https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/chirp
IF you look at https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/chirp , you'll see that only their bleeding edge repo, Rawhide, gets the dailies. All the other distros seem to get hand-selected versions (seems to be the 02/29/16 version) for whatever reason.
--David