Something like that. Building RPM and DEB packages is quite easy and very robust if you have sane build system and don't download random things from the intern

Something like that. Building RPM and DEB packages is quite easy and very robust if you have sane build system and don't download random things from the internets during the build. If you do download things, you need to invest some time into packaging them (maybe into one large bundle, if you managed to create a fractal of dependencies; such packages are atrocious if you'd want to publish them, but are OK if used internally), so you never ever hit the network during building the package. This gives several benefits, such as control over what is actually installed, resistance to software disappearing from repositories, or installation process that is repeatable (dependencies don't change their version magically between two installations). The resulting packages are very fast to install (you don't recompile modules on every single deployment and you don't need to install compilers, which can be heavy) and can pull other OS packages with necessary software. Even development process can gain a little, because you have a canonical place for build-time dependencies, so setting up a workstation for developing a service is easier.