I take issue with that (in the context of this conversation).
I think you are conflating "the Fedora / Debian free-software purist Linux distro packaging way" with "the open source way".
There is not one "open source way". There are many. Yours is not the only one, and I think you're getting a few people off-side by refusing to acknowledge that just because you want to do things a particular way that doesn't make your way inherently the only correct one and everyone else's wrong. Or maybe I'm just reading your tone wrong and being too prickly, but offlist discussion confirms to me that I'm not the only one if so.
Maven is open source. Waffle is open source. JBoss AS is open source. OpenOffice is open source, yet causes a lot of packaging pain too. Perl is open source, but CPAN makes packagers want to cry (I know, I've had to package CPAN modules). Ruby is open source, but the RubyGems system's interaction with packaging can be agonizing.
Packaging can be painful. Sometimes that's due to people doing insane things in the software you're trying to package. Sometimes that's due to necessary-but-frustrating-and-limiting distro/packaging policies. Sometimes it's due to more fundamental differences in the models of how distro packaging works vs how some other software works. If it's hard to package that doesn't make it wrong.
I think the way forward here is to propose a build profile set up that lets you omit the things you want to omit, including tests showing that the omitted features fail in a well-specified and graceful way. I at least have no objection to running >1 build configuration in TravisCI etc.
