[fromtheoutside]

And before "curl | sh" it was download from freshmeat and run "tar xfz; cd; make install".

It's not really better. Fact is we are running huge and complicated frameworks with lots of dependencies. These technologies are new and evolve fast. Distros don't have enough volunteers to decouple this mess and thus fail to provide stable packages. There is a good chance nobody wants an old version of hadoop anyways.

Containers are a whole other problem. Always bothered me that no one cares about building these images themselves. The documentation is there, you can build your own docker/vagrant/... containers and vms. It's just nobody seems to care anymore? Sometimes I don't even know where these images come from, distro, community, ...?