[steveklabnik]

It's fundamentally about decoupling. As the author of libfoo, I cannot keep up with all of the different Linux distros and how they do their thing. So you decouple the process by having two layers of maintainer; the upstream maintainer and the package maintainer. And I can't then also test my package with every other package on every other distro.

It has problems like anything else does, but it's pretty effective overall.

What specifically do you find bad about it?