I think that is a valid concern. It is something that is being worked on [1] by the community. When those things get reasonably stable I think then it will be time to get those packages accepted by their respective distros.

Though as pointed out in SR-116 without ABI stability (which will not appear until Swift 3) packages do not necessarily provide a silver bullet of portability.

I for one have been maintaining a PKGBUILD script for Arch Linux that allows for a native package to be created. It's currently not working due to some issues with binutils [2].

[1] https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-116 [2] https://bugs.swift.org/browse/SR-1023

I'm sure this is in progress, but yes it's a definite roadblock. Maybe I should help on getting it onto RHEL/CentOS since that's what I usually use for servers and I really like Swift.