[switch007]

> whether it has been properly packaged as a DEB/RPM/Snap/Flatpak/AUR/AppImage, etc.

Not sure if you're referring to a choice between packaging formats, or not packaging at all. If the latter, well, it's pretty tiring looking through a list of filenames which contains the platform and arch, downloading the correct one, then going to the project's wik and copy/pasting commands to create users, create systemd files etc. (Looking at you, Go devs). Oh, you want to upgrade it along with the rest of your software on your system? Fuck you.

I get it, packaging isn't painless. But if you've worked hard writing a piece of software, it seems bizarre not to spend some time on packaging and getting distros to accept it.

We like packaging, because it's awesome. A large collection of extremely trustworthy software, all a single, simple command away.

[klodolph]

> […] it seems bizarre not to spend some time on packaging and getting distros to accept it.

My personal experience is that it means, at the minimum, having a VM for that distro hot and ready to go, reading a bunch of documentation about how that distro does packaging, consulting an oracle to tell you which versions of that distro you should target, learning how this particular distro wraps your particular build system, translating all the dependencies, etc.

So it doesn’t seem like just “some time” to me. If you pass this off to a maintainer for that distro, they’re usually fairly experienced with that distro’s ecosystems and the tools.