It’s worse than just that. Say I pick Fedora as my base. Now my project is a pile of SRPMs, that need a nasty bootstrap to build (okay, this is hard to avoid),

It’s worse than just that. Say I pick Fedora as my base. Now my project is a pile of SRPMs, that need a nasty bootstrap to build (okay, this is hard to avoid), and I’m stuck using the Fedora build system. Which sucks, sorry. (Okay, at least there is only one Fedora build system.) Also a whole OS is dragged along. If I want to edit a dependency, eww, I have to commit patch files and muck with .spec files. Good times. Good tooling like the author describes could exist. No distro I’ve ever used is it. Gentoo is probably closer than Fedora, as Gentoo is actually intended to build packages as opposed to just running them.