I was a contributor to a small Linux desktop application ages ago. We absolutely had a regular flow of hapless users who installed the Debian-provided package a

I was a contributor to a small Linux desktop application ages ago. We absolutely had a regular flow of hapless users who installed the Debian-provided package and reported bugs that either never existed in upstream builds or had been fixed months before. I believe the situation was that Debian had packaged an obsolete version of the software for stable because of a misunderstanding of the versioning system. When upstream discovered the mistake and contacted them, they refused to update it to a modern version. Instead, they requested that we maintain their fork and backport literal years of fixes. This situation resulted in Debian distributing a broken version of our software for several years. I did not come away with positive impressions of their packaging processes.