These days (in my experience, which I believe is typical), no-one even uses release tarballs, everyone just uses the repositories. Maybe you can require your d

These days (in my experience, which I believe is typical), no-one even uses release tarballs, everyone just uses the repositories. Maybe you can require your developers to install esoteric tools, but that's no way to solicit contributions. For a compiler I worked on, we had a dependency on libphp5, which was enough to discourage anybody. But we also had dependencies on a particular version of flex, gengetopt, bison, autoconf, automake and _maketea_. The final one was a tool we wrote and had spun out into a separate project, which was written in Haskell, and required exactly ghc 6.10. Do you think we were going to get contributions from people who needed to install all of those just to fix a minor issue?