Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

I would suggest a slight correction to your assertion. At least for "true" FOSS applications, the ultimate solution might be for the distribution packagers to work directly on the upstream code base instead of on a distribution fork. The upstream code base would then support your "make rpm", but it would be Redhat/Fedora/SUSE/whoever who would actually run that to create the packages. And the distributino packagers would then have the additional task of monitoring the changes made by packagers for other distributions and making them harmonise (or at the very worst adding upstream "#ifndef FEDORA"s and suchlike) with their own needs, and making sure that upstream versions branches fit in with their own versioning requirements