[jancsika]

Is there some workable way to just add rando user-requested distros (or, more importantly, Debian) to a PPA? Is there some alternate/sane way to distribute packages for Gnu/Linux without smothering my development process in molasses?

I don't even mind creating a VM for every single distro a user requests, and doing a huge automated binary compilation fest for every release. The only thing I care about is that the software is distributed through channels which make it explicit that the current stable version is the only version I support.

[j605]

It is not the job of the developer to package software, that is for maintainers. The best you could do is specify dependencies and tell them how to compile. If it is proprietary, then you might have to support a few popular formats(debs and rpms) and make sure they also work on other distributions without much effort. For example Arch User Repository has google-chrome that repackages it into the native package format but since all dependencies are known, the binary packaged for Debian also works in Arch Linux.