The word "ancient" might not be a good choice but 0.96b was really a beta version and as such it expires much faster. Unfortunately, the expiry for 0.95.4 was not updated when it was released so it was declared "ancient" much too soon. A couple of bugs have been fixed since the beta version, so as usual it's really recommended to use the latest release. 0.96 will not expire before the end of 2006 so I don't think this is too much of a pain. There will be releases long before that with an extended expiry.

Also FreeBSD has already 0.96 in its ports as far as I know.