Obvious solution is to get friendly with the package maintainer, find a security vulnerability in the anti-feature you need, lodge security bug, get a CVE, and

Obvious solution is to get friendly with the package maintainer, find a security vulnerability in the anti-feature you need, lodge security bug, get a CVE, and ask real nicely an upgrade to include the feature^H^H^H^H^H^H^ fix you need. On a serious note, I deal with bug fix / feature requests regularly in Z-Stream (kernel) in an almost weekly cadence, getting the patch upstream, getting the request to backport, making an adequate test of the feature. Source: Worked in product security for little red, now big blue.