> It's sad to see maintainers take a "my way or the highway" approach to package maintenance, but this attitude has gradually become more accepted in Debian over the years.
It's frankly the only way to maintain a distribution relying almost completely on volunteer work! The more different options there are, the more expensive (both in terms of human cost, engineering time and hardware cost) testing gets.
It's one thing if you're, say, Red Hat with a serious amount of commercial customers, they can and do pay for conformance testing and all the options. But for a fully FOSS project like Debian, eventually it becomes unmaintainable.
Additionally, the more "liberty" distributions take in how the system is set up, the more work software developers have to put in. Just look at autotools, an abomination that is sadly necessary.
It's frankly the only way to maintain a distribution relying almost completely on volunteer work! The more different options there are, the more expensive (both in terms of human cost, engineering time and hardware cost) testing gets.
It's one thing if you're, say, Red Hat with a serious amount of commercial customers, they can and do pay for conformance testing and all the options. But for a fully FOSS project like Debian, eventually it becomes unmaintainable.
Additionally, the more "liberty" distributions take in how the system is set up, the more work software developers have to put in. Just look at autotools, an abomination that is sadly necessary.