Losses at Mandriva

because a package is not a static cog or block that you stack together with other blocks to create a distro. there is no one way to configure a package that is the "correct" or "right" way. different people have different needs. one distro might disable support for non-free media formats in a package in line with their philosophy of free software, while another might be focused on everything working out of the box and not be concerned with proprietary formats. other distros let the user decide, either by modularizing the package or providing separate packages for different configurations. source distros generally have a way for the user to change options at build time.

it's a far cry from one size fits all, and that's a good thing as it's what allows the flexibility and freedom we all enjoy to be possible.