I agree. It's sad to see maintainers take a "my way or the highway" approach to package maintenance, but this attitude has gradually become more accepted in Debian over the years. I've seen this play before, with different actors: gcc maintainers (regarding cross-bootstrapping ports), udev (regarding device naming, I think?), systemd (regarding systemd), and now with apt. Not all of them involved Canonical employees, and sometimes the Canonical employees were the voice of reason (e.g. that's how I remember Steve Langasek).
I'm sure some will point out that each example above was just an isolated incident, but I perceive a growing pattern of incidents. There was a time when Debian proudly called itself "The Universal Operating System", but I think that hasn't been true for a while now.
> It's sad to see maintainers take a "my way or the highway" approach to package maintenance, but this attitude has gradually become more accepted in Debian over the years.
It's frankly the only way to maintain a distribution relying almost completely on volunteer work! The more different options there are, the more expensive (both in terms of human cost, engineering time and hardware cost) testing gets.
It's one thing if you're, say, Red Hat with a serious amount of commercial customers, they can and do pay for conformance testing and all the options. But for a fully FOSS project like Debian, eventually it becomes unmaintainable.
Additionally, the more "liberty" distributions take in how the system is set up, the more work software developers have to put in. Just look at autotools, an abomination that is sadly necessary.
I'm sure some will point out that each example above was just an isolated incident, but I perceive a growing pattern of incidents. There was a time when Debian proudly called itself "The Universal Operating System", but I think that hasn't been true for a while now.