To be honest I'm fortunate enough to where maintenance work by sticking to "the latest and greatest" for application-level stuff is not hard. For system-level s

To be honest I'm fortunate enough to where maintenance work by sticking to "the latest and greatest" for application-level stuff is not hard. For system-level stuff in general it's been about relying on Debian or Ubuntu stuff, but then application-level management for the top layer ("the application", so to speak). I've only rarely been in situations where Debian packaging outright meant we couldn't move forward on something (one funny and annoying one was gettext being too old, but gettext is so coupled with libc for some reason that we couldn't just compile a fresh version...) The joys of not having to deal wit the extremes of any problem...