I disagree that it's a waste of time. (But I upvoted, because I think it's an important question, thereby adding to the conversation). > for so many different

I disagree that it's a waste of time. (But I upvoted, because I think it's an important question, thereby adding to the conversation). > for so many different package repositories and packaging formats? How many are there, though, really? In theory, the number is unbounded, but, in practice the number of distros is modest, the number of popular ones is smaller, and the number of unique packaging formats even smaller. Although a sibling comment alluded to it with distros being internally consistent, I wanted to unpack that a bit more. Specifically, one benefit I've found as a "user" (sysadmin/devops) is that of well-defined dependencies. This isn't inherent to packaging, but it tends to be a feature of the more mature systems and distros. The other benefit is that it provides a more universal mechanism of traceability and, thereby, at least a path to reproducibility of builds. This has implications for security, of course, but also for debugging.