Lyle Kopnicky
If it is a hurdle for me, I can imagine a lot of people are getting frustrated at trying to distribute their binaries on Linux.
I don't think so. Developers usually just don't, and the distribution packagers seem to enjoy their specific messes... otherwise, they wouldn't package, or rewrite their package management. OTOH, as a user I utterly dislike things like loki installers, or, even worse, some rpm for some random RedHat version as the only available download. If you really, really think that I'd like to use a binary package, and want to make me happy, make a tarball that fits into /opt, with a layout like foo/bin/foo-bin foo/bin/foo foo/share/data.foo foo/README.foo , foo/bin/foo being a shell script containing some magic to set FOO_DATA_DIR [1] to some value and then calls foo-bin, passing all command line options. The simpler the better, I rather hardcode paths according to my install than read through 300 lines of shell code. This, of course, isn't at all preferable to providing, in my case, a single .ebuild with build instructions and either get it included in the gentoo repository, or provide an overlay (and get that included in the overlay list) In a project, you usually either a) have someone who does all the packaging for major distros (which is a cool thing to do if you can't code yourself and don't want to be stuck with writing documentation), b) have each of the developers do packages for the distro they're using c) are lucky enough to be big (or important) enough so that distro package maintainers do the work for you. In either case, a source tarball is, and always will be, the most important thing to provide and the basis on which every other effort is built. If somebody is complaining that you're not providing more, recruit that somebody. In short: Just do a source tarball and don't worry about the rest. In the haskell case, just do a cabalised repo or tarball, preferably get it onto hackage, and don't worry about the rest. There are tools that automagically generate distribution packages from that. [1] and LD_LIBRARY_PATH and LD_PRELOAD -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited.