Well, actually I can't agree... The problem with upstream software is that the authors rarely take into account the existence of other projects, so the most of efforts taken by distro maintainers is to patch a "generic" version of a program to work nicely with others...keithpeter wrote:However, this is essentially *gardening* (pruning here, shaping there) not creative work. I hate to be blunt about this but we sometimes forget where the actual creativity is. Of course in a number of cases the Debian packager for a project is the developer her/himself.
So in fact, maintainers of a distro are those who essentially are getting the things to work - not the authors of particular programs...
Of course this is a generalisation - each particular case would have to be examined separately, if we would like to have representative results.
Besides, there is a whole class of applications, which are distribution-independant (mostly the desktop apps) - and in such case it's relatively simple task to package them.
Regards.