That's unnecessarily harsh. Distro maintainer's primary responsibility is making the Distro as a whole work together and sometimes that means choices that are not optimal for individual programs/libraries on their own. But packaging itself does already reduce the burden on upstream a lot by preempting any build-related support requests from users as well as many compatibility-related ones.
Sometimes upstreams interest is also not aligned with the user's interest (e.g. the topic of this thread) and there the distro will tend to choose the user's interests - that's a good thing.
As for time bombs specifically, those don't make much sense when the software is installed via a repository that has an update mechanism. Not wanting bug reports for old versions is no excuse for planned obsolence.
If you think a distro is increasing your support burden it is quite acceptable to tell users from that distro to use the distro's bug tracker.
That's unnecessarily harsh. Distro maintainer's primary responsibility is making the Distro as a whole work together and sometimes that means choices that are not optimal for individual programs/libraries on their own. But packaging itself does already reduce the burden on upstream a lot by preempting any build-related support requests from users as well as many compatibility-related ones.
Sometimes upstreams interest is also not aligned with the user's interest (e.g. the topic of this thread) and there the distro will tend to choose the user's interests - that's a good thing.
As for time bombs specifically, those don't make much sense when the software is installed via a repository that has an update mechanism. Not wanting bug reports for old versions is no excuse for planned obsolence.
If you think a distro is increasing your support burden it is quite acceptable to tell users from that distro to use the distro's bug tracker.