I did set up the cron job on my main desktop -- that was a nice contribution by absolut. But this morning I ssh'd in and ran dist-upgrade before I looked at the forum (living dangerously here ....). I have the new plugin version, but I dunno whether I got it from the cron job or the d-u.
I think I will set up the cron job on one my other systems and see what happens with no d-u today.