What is the cleanest or most optimal way to keep an up-to-date installation of Node along with its accompanying packages on OS X? Homebrew always seems a touch behind (except for `head`). 

Additionally, an interesting observation from the [Node.js wiki says](https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager):

> 
> **Warning:** brew installs are known to be buggy
> 
> 
> 

Further, is there a preferred method to update the installed packages as well (across node updates and just generally updating them)?