Will LIRC work with standard Debian kernels yet?

[Matthew E. <082...@ex...>]

I used to use LIRC, up to about a year ago.  Then I discovered the joys 
of using the standard Debian kernel, and never looked back.  It just 
upgrades itself!  Automatically!  True, it was impossible to use LIRC, 
because I didn't have source code to my kernel lying around any more, 
and the binary drivers didn't track the kernel versions, but the 
benefits of being able to easily upgrade my kernel far outweighed the 
inconvenience of having to click the buttons on the console when I watch 
a DVD.

Anyway, just wondered if there's been any progress on making LIRC and 
Debian play nice together since then.  Presumably LIRC is a long way off 
from being included in the official Linux sources.  What about 
distributing binary modules that track the kernel packages?  I even 
found recently that I could build the realtime module from source, 
without full kernel sources, by using a thing called "module-assistant". 
It worked really well for realtime, but fails for LIRC.  Should that work?

Thanks,
Mat