To me the main advantage of standalone packages (thanks for reminding me of what they're called) is that they just work (to borrow a phrase from Apple's fan clu

To me the main advantage of standalone packages (thanks for reminding me of what they're called) is that they just work (to borrow a phrase from Apple's fan club). Having to solve installation/compilation/dependency issues is just a waste of time, when those problem don't need to exist at all (things can just be packaged with all dependencies and dumped onto another machine). I also like the fact that .dmg files are self-contained installers that don't touch any files outside of the ApplicationName.app folder they install to. So that to uninstall something installed from a .dmg file all you need to do is delete the ApplicationName.app "file"/folder. There's nothing advanced that Mac OS X is doing here. See the Ruby Enterprise Edition installer for how nice the world could be if only there were a change in the way most people think about distributing software in the Linux world. REE installs to its own folder and doesn't touch any system files; it also needs very little from the system besides the compiler (so no dependencies afaik). That's why it just works every time I install it. Now contrast that with ImageMagick.