> otherwise you'll have to invest a ton of time into many different people and you don't have that kind of bandwidth.

but who is investing this time and bandwidth?

It seems like this sort of governance model allows politics to replace egalitarianism or meritocracy. I could have become a Debian contributor/packager many times over, but it always seemed not worth it for a thankless job which is mostly dealing with bureaucracy and red tape instead of actually solving technical matters.

(To be fair, I've since moved on to Funtoo, which, like Gentoo, is very egalitarian -- but requires a certain, rather high, level of technical interest and expertise which is its own filtering function. On the other hand, Debian's packaging policies are very strict, and many distributions have much less strict packaging policies.)

How do the less-difficult distributions such as Arch or Alpine do it with less overhead (and is that better or worse?)

I always kind of wonder why self packaging isnt a better supported thing in general? Like if i use macos, why not read the brewfile from the repo directly and so on. Your are already trusting the software to not mess with your system to a certain extent anyway

Honestly I'm not so sure the arch packaging situation _is_ that healthy these days. More cases of updates being long delayed for stuff like glibc and some security fixes. I hope the gitlab migration ultimately opens up more contributions to a more nixos-like contribution model

Good luck doing it without starting a cult or a monastery, though.

How does one start a successful monastery, by the way?