As a sysadmin, seeing this kind of stuff gives me The Rage(tm). Don't fight the distro - your distro of choice (Debian, RedHat, BSD, -buntu, whatever) already

As a sysadmin, seeing this kind of stuff gives me The Rage(tm). Don't fight the distro - your distro of choice (Debian, RedHat, BSD, -buntu, whatever) already HAS ways of deploying your software. It even plays nice with interdependencies between different packages, allows custom scripts at different stages of deployment, etc. They're not perfect, but they ARE standard. Learn them, use them, love them, and if there's anything particularily egregious about some aspect of them, they're open source so you can submit patches. Literally every job I've ever had as a sysadmin has started with "...so the developers rolled their own software distribution tool and we're learning the hard way that we've blown a sizable hole in our collective foot with it". Working with developers to apply a suitable dose of RPM or DEB magic (99% of the time, these systems are Linux-based and speak one of those two packages) solves the problem, and everyone agrees that it's a better solution. Don't fight the distro, people. They've hit all of your problems harder, sooner, and with more edge-cases than you can care to imagine.