[datr]

Well, I suppose I mention some of these as the article likens package deployment to Capistrano in the opening paragraph.

Using Capistrano, for (1) I can just mark a target server as the update server to run these commands. With packages, I assume I either have to have a different version of the package or rely on some sort of environmental variable which the package reacts to?

2) Yep that would be slightly ridiculous for production, but I was thinking more along the lines of UAT, staging and other shared testing/development environments. It's not ideal but I have been in the situation where this was required.

3) True, but with Cap I can just issue a rollback and it will revert to a database snapshot that was taken from the last version. I can't see how we could do something like this with packages alone.

Maybe you mean that these problems are outside the scope of packages and that I should be using packages with something like capistrano to solve them but then why wouldn't I just use Capistrano on its own?