[ilyt]

>There's still no widely accepted answer for what 'properly package their apps' looks like. You could want snaps or appimages or a flatpak, or rpms or debs or docker containers or nix flakes or cargo crates or python virtual environments or jars or javawebstarts or portable windows executables or windows msis or webasm packages or web pages ...

Any single one of them is better than curl|sh. Just pick one. Even shipping raw runnable binary blob is preferred.

But to classify, as long as it is a unit managed by a system that can be wholly removed (sans data/configs, as you might want to keep those), it works well enough as "package">

> there's an impossible profusion that it's currently unreasonable to expect devs (many of whom are working for free) to support more than a couple of.

...I don't think I ever saw anyone asking to support more than one for a platform. Obviously users on MacOS (assuming app even releases there) will complain if you only have .deb packages but you won't get many "oh, only .deb ? I wanted a flatpack!"

[kybernetikos]

> I don't think I ever saw anyone asking to support more than one for a platform

What do you mean by platform? If you only ship a .deb, there are going to be a lot of linux and unix users who simply can't use your stuff.

I've seen quite a few tools use curl to bash to work in macOS, windows and multiple flavours of unix. There aren't a huge number of other approaches that can allow that.