Its not as popular to distribute projects as source on windows, but ive personally built a dozen or so libs and dependencies from cmake into msbuild/visual studio SLN files, so it actually does happen because I've found that Linux devs don't tend to distribute precompiled binaries at all. I think this trend it changing now though because I see a lot of github projects releasing binaries for a lot of different platforms in the releases section.
Aaand I probably don't remember last time I needed to set version explicitly, it's usually just a single version of everything, mind sharing your case?
I wish it was just a matter of the `-<version>` thing... Debian metadata (control, rules...) and its build system (sbuild, rebuild) is arcane and feels old. Having to maintain a Debian feed is a major PITA.
You just don't ever get to build anything - so problem solved! :)