> There is absolutely no need to have hundreds - thousands? - of developers spending their valuable time packaging up software when the app developers could do

> There is absolutely no need to have hundreds - thousands? - of developers spending their valuable time packaging up software when the app developers could do it just as well - or better, on account of knowing the software that they are packaging. 1. Because that puts extra work on the developers who don't necessarily know the target system very well. What if the developer doesn't know the FHS (which apparently is quite common, given what I've seen...)? How are you going to manage dependencies if the packaging systems differ widely (and no, there's no one way to bridge them all, because some of them differ because of the whole construction of the distribution itself!). 2. They'll never do it. (#1 leads to #2, but seriously, it's enough work getting developers to write a proper Makefile/gemfile/setup.py or whatever is appropriate for the language they're working in. Now you want them to do it 100 times over, for systems that they've probably never used before?) That works for something like sta.li, in which everything is statically linked, because then you have no problem. But when you start talking about dependency tracking and small-but-important configuration differences between distributions, this becomes impossible. The solution is to use a two-tiered approach, which some distributions sort of already do. If I make a Python program, for example, I create a setup.py file and all of the other things that you need to install it with pip (sidenote: this is embarassingly complicated for a language that's dead-simple otherwise!). Then, I let each distro's community handle it themselves - after all, they know their system better than I do, and remember that I've already listed all dependencies, etc. because I've packaged the program itself properly! Then, the distribution can figure out how to handle those packages - perhaps installing them directly through pip is the best solution, or perhaps they add an extra layer the language-specific package (check out the AUR for something similar to this), or perhaps they want to just hard-code the file destinations. Whatever makes the most sense in the context of the distribution itself.