[schmonz]

Upstream developers don't know best, either. Packagers sometimes make bad decisions, just like upstream does, because we're all people. "Install our software the way we think you should" is a point of view, but not a very smart one unless it's accompanied by a willingness to be persuaded otherwise. This particular upstream developer clearly hasn't seen an OS-agnostic cross-platform package manager like pkgsrc, where one of the packager's tasks is often to make software more portable than upstream cares to bother with. To take one obvious example, we make sure libtool works on all our supported platforms, and then we make sure software with its own precious all-the-world's-a-Linux way of linking shlibs uses libtool instead. Do we try to feed back our portability fixes upstream? Of course. Does upstream always want them? Of course not. Are they wrong to not care? We sometimes think so. Are we wrong to patch their code? They sometimes think so. They have their goals, we have ours. If anyone reliably knows best about anything, it's users.