Isn't that just "running" the software? To me, "deployment" implies some repeated process that actually wasn't especially valuable to automate or be very carefu

Isn't that just "running" the software? To me, "deployment" implies some repeated process that actually wasn't especially valuable to automate or be very careful about when software was released once a year (and hence the reason it wasn't). Also, disks are a horrible way to deploy software. They have all the same problems of just distributing a random tarball: What operating system is it for? What version? Where do I copy the files? How do I get the OS to automatically start the service on startup? What version of make does it use? How about which libc and cc? You can say this stuff in the README (or printed docs) but isn't something more "deployable" when it's all machine-readable and can be reasoned about automatically? This is what package managers were invented for.