Darren Benham, the official Debian maintainer for AbiWord, is on the list,
so I'm sure he can give you a better answer than this, but here's a start.
1. Darren's been building the official .deb packages since 0.5.1, and
feeding us back lots of changes. This is a Good Thing, and the very last
thing we want to do is step on his toes or get in his way.
2. Shaw and Jeff have done the work to create an automated build system
that allows us to spit out various package formats as part of our production
builds process. This is also a Good Thing.
3. I wouldn't be at all surprised if there's currently some divergence
between what we spit out and what Darren's been doing. Like any major
release, the few days prior are sheer chaos, and this is the first time
we've even attempted to release .deb packages.
However, don't forget that all of our package-creating logic is in CVS, so
it should be quite easy to iron out any gratuitous differences. If we're
not applying patches fast enough, get on our case about it. :-)
Paul