Yeah, quality varies. But the vast majority of this is volunteer work. If I were developer of some app and I wanted it to work on Fedora, I'd probably be the ma

Yeah, quality varies. But the vast majority of this is volunteer work. If I were developer of some app and I wanted it to work on Fedora, I'd probably be the maintainer of its package. But if I didn't want to do that, I'd at least be in contact with the person who was. "Hey heads up, we broke compat. Let me know if we need to huddle or something." Also seems a lot easier than inventing Flatpak and getting distros and users to use/like it. So much of this stuff is like a default unwillingness to work with humans over the internet, but that's fundamentally how FOSS works. A couple years ago there was a kerfluffle between the scientific community and SciPy--the community wanted SciPy to maintain compatibility literally forever and also continue adding new features. SciPy was like, "that's impossible, and even if we wanted to it would take the resources of Microsoft to do". But they never talked about it! Instead there were open letters and forum threads. The quickest route to fixing social problems like this--and they are social--is to deal with people. I'm pretty misanthropic, but even I have to admit this is true. > Distros use the word "maintain" to describe what they're doing, but they don't seem to be doing that. To maintain a piece of software I'd expect the maintainer to need a deep understanding of the source code and to continually monitor changes. The complaints maintainers post that software changed seem to prove they aren't doing that. I just want to point out that this is asking a lot. You're essentially asking Debian to find volunteers to become as knowledgeable about, say, Libreoffice, as the developers themselves. That's probably not gonna happen. I think a more reasonable definition of "maintainer" is "ensures the package continues to work on ${DISTRO}, reaches out to the developers if a new update breaks that". I'm not defending the case you brought up, that sounds pretty lazy to me, but in the vast majority of cases it works great.