Needless Forks

Yet, that is what is happening a lot more than before. The problem is not that distributions do not care about it (although the level will vary) but a lot of upstream projects have historically ignored this problem. Projects like GTK have been exceptions. A lot of base platform libraries are adopting a saner model (as defined in http://www106.pair.com/rhp/parallel.html) over time and distributions will naturally inherit this trait. The alternative is just sticking to a base version and backporting which has its own tradeoffs.