[jodyribton]

The problem is package managers aren't consistent across distributions. If you want to provide a binary version of your app, you should be providing at least .deb, .rpm and tarball packages.

In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.

[digi_owl]

The basic problem there is that essencially all package formats are tar-balls, bit each one use a different way to note dependencies (and none of them seem to handle having multiple minor lib versions installed side by side).

Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop integration.

After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.

[pjmlp]

And that is not enough, if the package needs to call distribution specific tools or access specific paths.