Losses at Mandriva

Actually, I don't mean to be disrespectful, and I don't want this to turn in a pissing match, but I hope you realise most packagers do not have the luxury of having a $dayjob at a big Linux company, with a backup team, packaging stuff they are paid to work on, and leveraging company IT resources for stuff they do in their spare time. Also none of your packages strike me as either having a high connectivity or being released by an entity not having the resources to push out clean QAed releases.

Which is in no way a criticism of your many qualities or work. You just seem to be in an extremely privileged situation for packaging, and rather unrepresentative of the many people that transformed a small RHL in a huge Fedora repository.

I work upstream-side too when possible. I say when, because this is not by any measure the general case, and your average packager do not have by any measure the resources or backup to change this situation. Or the luxury to just rewrite bits when an upstream is not helpful.

What you're asking for is the BSD model of highly controlled well-behaved core code. I happen to believe one reason for Linux' success is it made a big place for less-than-perfect joyous anarchy, and this was made possible by the packaging layer you complain of here.