@HerraBRE personal opinion: neither. The only new packaging systems worth a damn are Nix/Guix, which have specific mechanisms to address the flaws of part of their model.
@samis I realized I didn't express very clearly WHY I am asking this question... but answers which require all my potential users switch operating systems before using my software are out of scope. 🤪
@HerraBRE Neither of them are exclusively system package managers, they can easily run on the same system as another, without interfering with it.
@HerraBRE You could bundle it with the initial download of your software.
@samis We're back when we started then: what is the format of that initial download?
@HerraBRE Given the contents of the download, a self-extracting archive is sufficient for this stage.
@samis Is this a standard feature offered in the guix/nix world, or are we being theoretical here?
@HerraBRE No, but it's not entirely unheard of outside of it. The VMWare tools are an example of something using this approach.
@samis Thank you for bringing this up. It's an interesting option I hadn't considered.
@HerraBRE If you're interested, this program can automatically create such an archive (in the form of a shell script): https://makeself.io/
@samis Wow, makeself is still a thing? 😮
OMG, and https://makeself.io/ is still linking to setup.sh which I created what feels like a lifetime ago... and my name is still in the credits (I'm Bjarni).
🤯
I had forgotten about that.
Thanks for the link!
@yegortimoshenko @samis Just to be clear, I am pretty sure my contributions were minor. But it's been so long, that I cannot even be sure.
Mind still blown. 🤪
@samis That's interesting, I did not know that.
But if I have to ask people to first install a package manager before they can install my software, that's still kinda the same thing, isn't it?