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the issue is more that on windows or mac, the app and whatever third party libs it use, come as a bundle.

this can be both a blessing and a curse. i recall microsoft finding a problem in one of their base libs. but the only real fix they could provide was some patches for their own products, and a program to sniff out other copies of the lib in the folders of the individual third party apps.

but from a usability standpoint, having one stop downloads of software from places like filehippo, snapfiles, download.com or the classical tucows, makes it simpler for third party developers to just toss the program up there and hope someone finds use for it.

then there is ever so slight variations in where files go. when i recently tried to install some stuff for kde i encountered that one had to set a compile time option pointing to where the base directory of kde was. this because some distros, like debian, put it in /opt/kde, while others put them under /usr.

this, and having rpm, deb, and maybe a host of other variants makes it a nightmare to maintain intallers.

thank god that i choose to use gobolinux, where i can go makerecipe on a url to the sourcecode tar-ball if there isnt one up on the recipe store, and 9 times out of 10 it will install neatly in its own versioned sub-dir under /programs.

if one is lucky one can even invoke newversion when a more recent version then the one the recipe store have available shows up, and the old one will be used as a basis to make a new recipe.

and if one wants to make a binary package. go createpackage after the compile. this basically tar-balls the versioned subfolder and thats it

mind you, the current gui available for managing all this, manager, is dreadful. i wonder if i should read up on python and see if i can rework it.