[AUCTeX] Auctex in ELPA is a bit old. Recommended version?

[Max Henner Gerlach]

Hello,

I am running a snapshot of GNU Emacs version 24.1.50.1 on Ubuntu
12.04. I was happy to find that Auctex can simply be installed via the
new package manager now. Unfortunately, the stable version 11.86
provided there is quite old now. On my system I cannot get the
previews to work, which apparently is related to recent versions of
Ghostscript (there are related bug reports from 2010 in the bug-auctex
list archives.

Switching to a more recent development version of Auctex fixes that
problem. Is there a snapshot you would recommended to use? Currently I
use auctex-20120426-a from
http://theotp1.physik.uni-ulm.de/~ste/comp/emacs/auctex/snapshots/ftp
but there I experience other issues, mainly apparently hooks like
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'reftex-mode) have no effect.

Kind regards,
Max Gerlach