Packaging LSB packages - a first glimpse
In my opinion the current software-packaging/software-install system for Linux systems is a crappy thing:
Every distribution packages the most interesting and important packages for itself: KDE stuff, GNOME, compiler, apache, and add on packages like firefox. Therefore, each work is repeated not only twice but dozens of times. For Suse, for Fedora Core, for Ark Linux, for Debian, for Ubuntu, and so on. And the packages are usually not compatible between the different distributions.
This is dumb - I must know it because I’m part of the game (I package ktorrent and rsibreak for Fedora Core).
The reasons behind this is well known: there was no standard at the beginning, and therefore everyone did it his/her own way. These ways were different sometimes, depending on the roots of the packager. The result is as already mentioned: duplicate work (ha, if only, multiplicate work is closer to the truth), incompatibility - and the worst result is that software for Linux is usually released as the source code only, without any chance for an average computer user to install it.