Currently we don't have any plans to make it a separate repository. This is largely because of packaging issues - most of the distros currently struggle with packaging Go components. We're working closely with them to make this better but in the meantime libcontainer lives in the pkg/ directory to make it easier for us to ship Docker.
You can most certainly use netlink in the same way and we'd love a PR for IPv6 support for it!
Can you explain this? How is it hard to package a statically linked binary into an rpm or deb? How can it be harder than a C program? Are you talking about creating -dev packages?
You can most certainly use netlink in the same way and we'd love a PR for IPv6 support for it!