I use Debian on all my computers. The stable branch for servers and testing for others. Debian testing is sufficiently up-to-date for my taste. The very few things that are not can usually be installed anyway through backports or other repository. The last case I had (but that's a perhaps once in a year scenario) was with Batteries [1]. I needed version 2.1 but Debian testing only has 2.0, what I did is simply to install Batteries through opam [2] rather than apt-get install it.

[1] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/

[2] http://opam.ocaml.org/