[tomatocracy]

Just to add - I think the backports repositories don't get enough attention when this occasionally comes up.

Trying to run a mix of stable and testing packages can be a pain as occasionally a package you want to bring in from testing will try to bring with it new system libraries, which in turn often conflict with the "stable" versions of packages (so you are forced to move a lot more of your system to "testing" packages than you originally wanted to fix this).

The key advantage (at least for me) of using the "backports" repositories is that it avoids this - packages are compiled against the "[yourrelease]" system libraries.