> On the other hand, by giving a pre-warning to the general public and coordinating the fix with distro maintainers in a closed mailing list, anyone who even remotely cares will be scheduling maintenance windows right when the deadline expires - and patches will be ready for immediate use.

It seems that one of the most productive positions for an intelligence agency to infiltrate is a distro maintainer. They don’t ever have to do anything suspicious, just do a great job maintaining the distro and just give access to the intelligence agency of all these vulnerabilities under embargo.