my oppinion on backports for woody or sarge

Be warned, this whole thing is only my oppinion. Its nothing more and nothing less.

people using woody with self made backports

The biggest problem with this is, that you mostly have to manually check dependencies, because when you simply take a package from sid, it has dependencies made for sid and not for woody. So you will run into problems. And there is the problem, that you have to manually recompile on every security update.

people using stuff from backports.org

Well, I don't want to rant against backports.org, but I recently had the problem that stuff from backports.org had a problem which was solved months ago in sid. The problem was, that we wanted to use a newer libldap (2.1) in combination with samba 3.0. This alone was no problem, but when using cups, samba would link 2 different versions of libgcrypt into its address space and crash afterwards.

So there is one thing I found out: using woody with backports does not in any way mean that its stable!