In principle and the traditional vision, the roles were clear enough. Upstream developers had to create and support their own projects, including multiple libraries, tools and modules, possibly for multiple operating systems. Distribution maintainers had the responsibility of collecting a significant software set, porting on various architectures, choosing versions that work well together for each piece of software, patching for coherence and well-established policies, eventually providing a build and installation system for the end users. At the end of the day, a quite complicated and articulated work that many people out there do for fun, others as a full-time job.