How does lilypond get into distribution repositories anyway? Is there any thing I can do to help in this regard?
You may ask the distro maintainer to upgrade the package.In Fedora, lilypond 2.20 is currently available in rawhide (33), but I guess it will be available soon in 32 as soon as it passes from beta to stable.
Same for Debian, I see 2.20 in testing: https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=lilypond
