Hi,
Some of us have put together an open letter to the Linux packaging community, outlining why Bitcoin is different to other programs and asking them to not patch or modify the upstream sources.
Please consider signing it if you agree (I think the wording by now is fine, so don't edit the contents - use the comment feature if you want to though).
The trigger for this is the discovery that Debian bitcoind's got split out of the consensus some time in April, for reasons that nobody yet figured out but is presumably related to a patch (eg it uses system leveldb).