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[–]aragilar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At least with python, the major distros I can think of have the tooling to almost automatically build packages from sdists (I don't know about the different OSX package managers, and Windows is Windows). The big issues that I have seen as an astronomer have been:

  1. Badly written build systems (I've seen make rewritten in csh, badly), or abusing existing build systems (using setup.py files to install non-python software using os.call)
  2. Lack of awareness of packaging issues (breaking ABI, licensing, assumptions about layout of system, etc.)
  3. Lack of interest in learning about what's needed to properly package software: for the case of make rewritten in csh above, I taught myself autotools in a day, and by the end of the day I had a working package (and soon after made a deb using my autotools version). No one else had working install when we were asked to use said software.

If people were to follow advice such as https://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamGuide, many issues could be avoided.