[mikepurvis]

Preventing distros from patching software at all would be a non-starter; there are lots of legitimate reasons to want/need to patch things.

Indeed, most patches I see in off-beat systems like nixpkgs, homebrew, etc, are not plucked from preexisting pull requests, but rather are fixes developed by the person who did the packaging and submitted upstream, then included as a patch until the first tagged release that has them merged.