> there’s no guarantees whatsoever the package works once unvendored. And it’s precisely the job of the maintainer to ensure that it does, and more generally t

> there’s no guarantees whatsoever the package works once unvendored. And it’s precisely the job of the maintainer to ensure that it does, and more generally that all the various things that they ship together not conflict with each other. Assembling a coherent system despite each individual developer’s understandably narrow view—in explicit opposition to that view, if need be,—is and always was a distro maintainer’s job description. Unfortunately, the bug reporting story has become worse over time. GNU packages included a configuration-time override for the bug reporting email to accomodate distributions and other modifications, but in most software today you’ll more often see a hardcoded link to the upstream homepage. And of course people will often just ask Google for the bug tracker address instead. This leads to understandable annoyance on the part of upstream developers. (It still doesn’t make acting against their intent improper in any way, though.)