There's examples of maintainers/packagers effectively sabotaging other peoples projects when making packages for distros, whether that's shipping them broken, ancient versions etc.
e.g. Bottles, WebkitGTK (distros liked keeping this one held back even though doing so is a security risk)
IMHO it shouldn't be the responsibility of the OS vendor to package third party applications.
Distro maintainers/packagers are who keep the current software stacks running. It's rather amazing how they manage to keep the billion or so lines of separately written code working in unison.
That said, the labor needed to keep the stuff together could be reduced a lot by the more ergonomical and universal packaging and distribution methods like Cargo (and, dare I say, npm). I think some kind of a better bridge between developers and distros could be found here.
> > I think some kind of a better bridge between developers and distros could be found here.
Every tom dick and harry is making their own distro these days (even if they're just respins of Arch with Calamares and some questionable theme settings), why add more work onto developers?
We have things like Flatpak and Docker now that let application developers ignore the distros and stop them breaking things, unless you're Ubuntu whom is constantly begging to get purchased by Microsoft.
> I think some kind of a better bridge between developers and distros could be found here.
I don’t think there’s a need to do so. Only discipline is needed, by using stable and mature dependencies, and documenting the building process. And maybe some guides/scripts for the most popular distros.
e.g. Bottles, WebkitGTK (distros liked keeping this one held back even though doing so is a security risk)
IMHO it shouldn't be the responsibility of the OS vendor to package third party applications.