update

drush up drupal

In your hook_install() and/or hook_update_N() implementation, this sort of code will create a new nodequeue (if it already exists, you'll only get database errors, though this could be worked around with a bit more code if for some reason you couldn't rely on what the site you are updating has or not).

This isn't pretty. And i've probably left out a critical step.

Core concepts: making some changes directly in the database. Enabling head2head and alpha2alpha in the database (setting both status and schema_version). Manually commenting out the update hooks that i did in the database to make user module's updates work so that alpha2alpha's can work.

Setting the line in alpha2alpha.module to give the current version:

<?php
  $version = variable_get('alpha2alpha_version', 7);
?>

The version of drush in Debian is way behind. Drush 3.1 has been out for a month, Drush reached stable 3.0 on April 23.

Stefan was unsympathetic:

That does not mean the package is ready. What the upstream authors consider stable and the Debian community considers stable might be different things, too. Quality is Debian's top priority not up to date software. In addition to that it will only get into the next stable distro and maybe into the backports repository. In that case we get the upgrade automatically.