[spokspeakspoke]

Been going through the Debian Maintainer process by reading through the Debian official docs. The internalpointers blog post is hand's down more lucid than anything I read on the wiki. I think the other comments here reflect that sentiment.

[NCommander]

The best equivalent I can give is this is roughly like opening up a MSI file, and replacing its guts. It works but you're asking for a really fragile system in return.

What is the problem with distributing a tarball if you're sending binaries?

If you're making debs, you still need to make a Debian repo and sign it, and then you still have the problem your dependencies are fucked up or won't easily work across versions.

What are you trying to solve that a tarball or rsync can't?

[defanor]

Not OP, but also packaging binaries into .debs, and the primary reasons for that (as opposed to using tarballs or rsync) are centralized package management, including dependency checks, and scripts to execute on installation (e.g., add system users).

[Mashimo]

> What are you trying to solve that a tarball or rsync can't?

End users can install a deb with one click without having to know about where to put the files, or how to create a shortcut in menu.