Some day when I'm rich and bored, I hope to help a distro move in this direction. It'd be really really cool to have a fully, very easily, debuggable and then fixable system where you could debug any running code on the system, and patch it, and recompile and debug again, and decide you like your change, and then push the change as a PR to the distro, in a streamlined process. The distro (like arch) would then help/encourage/nudge you to sending your patch upstream also.

Ubuntu et al, know where their sources come from after all, and how to build each package. I wonder if Arch or gentoo wouldn't be a better fit for this. I do have quite a bit of experience with yocto and buildroot, building distros for embedded systems.

I'm joking about the rich and bored, part. I should just jump in and do it.