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In principle "traditional" curated Linux distro package systems will patch stuff even if upstream is unresponsive.
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Sorry I should have clarified that I was referring to language based systems (cargo, pip, npm, etc). But you do raise a good point, it’s less about the concept of package management and more around the point of curation and central security guarantees / policies / procedures. In theory RHEL package management system could have similar problems to cargo or npm, but they are much better funded and thus managed.
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In practice, not principle. Virtually every non-trivial upstream package in debian/fedora/arch/whatever has at least a handful of distro-specific patches. Sometimes they're just configuration, sometimes they're distro-maintained security fixes, etc...

But people exercise those features regularly and distros are not shy about maintaining software. It's a very different world from "We Just Ship What They Give Us" in npm/cargo/etc...

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There's plenty of open source things from Google and Microsoft that's been abandoned too; so you'd need to evaluate the project independently of the sponsor.

This doesn't apply to close source things because you wouldn't be able to use it in the first place.

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I really hate it when various packages expect users to add their custom repo. Especially for something where I don’t care about updates.

Feels like every little thing should be in its own docker container with limited filesystem access. Of course that is a whole lot of trouble…

The dependency trees in cargo/pip also greatly bother me.

VS Code extensions are also under appreciated. Some turd makes a “starter pack” for rust/python/etc with a great set of common extensions… plus a few that nobody has heard of… Over time, they reach 50k-100k downloads and start to appear legit… Excellent way to exfiltrate trade secrets!!!

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