>I don't agree with that approach. It sounds nice for a sysadmin, but as a programmer I don't want to have to wait for you or the distributor to approve and package the libs I need to work with.

Which is why development, QA, staging and production are all separate environments. Do what you want in your dev environment: when the code is ready for testing let the ops team know what the dependencies are. We'll take care of wrapping everything in packages and updating chef/puppet/whatever to deploy it.