Matt, thanks for sending me the new version of apt-utils.el, but guess what, last time I had an apt-utils.el in my private dir so long, it started to mask the official debian version, so this time I dare not put it in my private dir, lest I forget about it and thus block updates for years.
Indeed, I recommend all debian emacs users drop what they are doing and run ... this, oh, from anacron regularly: cd ${MyEmacsDir?} && ls *.el*|sed '[EMAIL PROTECTED]@/@;s/\.elc$/.el/'|xargs dlocate to notify them if they are masking any debian official versions .el[c] that came along. Those who need to can soup up the above line to make it compare dates even, or perhaps even "search packages not even installed yet".