[epage]

We want to make our software available to any system without every library maintainer being a packaging expert in every system.

The user experience is much better when working within tkese packaging systems.

You can control versions of software independent of the machine (or what distros ship).

Or in other words, the needs of software development and software distribution are different. You can squint and see similarities but the fill different roles.

[jonhohle]

So every user has to be an expert in every package manager instead? Makes sense. Make life easy for the developer and pass the pain on to thousands of users. 20 years ago you may or may not support RPM and DEB and for everyone else a tarball with a make file that respected PREFIX was enough. (Obviously a tarball doesn’t support dependencies.)

[epage]

Why would users need to be an expert in them?