The admins and distribution maintainers in this article are really a proxy for all stakeholders beyond a developer who's doing the minimum to get a feature into

The admins and distribution maintainers in this article are really a proxy for all stakeholders beyond a developer who's doing the minimum to get a feature into production. But, the requirements the tooling and workflows were built for didn't lend themselves to use in development, preventing evolution into tools that work well for more use cases. I started rebuilding and deploying .debs with custom patches for production 15 years ago. For some projects .rpms or .debs are the only way we distribute builds that go beyond individual developer workstations. It's an absolute luxury on projects that are amenable to workflow. But I've never been a distro maintainer. So I both feel limitations of the tool, and simultaneously don't feel like I have a good grasp on leveraging those those tools as well as I could.