[mbreese]

And some random shell script installer is going to better than a dedicated package manager at dealing with the differences between N many distributions and M many architectures?

Sure, some install scripts will be quite simple, but in that case, why do you need to have the install script in the first place? You'd only need it if the installation procedure was too complicated for an `INSTALL` or `README` document.

[dmitriid]

> And some random shell script installer is going to better than a dedicated package manager at dealing with the differences between N many distributions and M many architectures?

Surprisingly, yes. Especially for *nix systems where a lot of things (but not package managers) are more-or-less unified. The author may not have the time or desire to learn the half-a-dozen or so package managers and set up a build system to create packages for all of those, and then do the work of getting them into the standard repositories.