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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

The answer is to not do it. Provide the source and help distro maintainers to package it for you. You can help by being responsive to maintainers' questions, making sure the source is clean (no binary blobs, weird licenses, strange build systems, generally builds like similar packages), and integrating patches from maintainers upstream.

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If I don't make my program easy to install, many people won't even try it.

Being responsive to maintainers doesn't help if maintainers never reach out or even actively refuse to package your software.

In the early stages you can help by making your source code easy to build. No weird build system, make dependencies optional as much as possible, document how to build, reduce the number of steps required and make them as similar as possible to comparable software. Linux users will put up with this. That also helps distro packagers so it's a win-win.

The existence of a build step at all, even a nice and simple one, is enough to deter lots of users who would find a lot of software useful. Remember that nontechnical users exist (e.g. folks who only know how to install software via a GUI).

Sure. They'll get it when it's packaged by the distro. Following the steps I outline will make that happen faster.

In order to be packaged, it first needs to become popular, so this is a chicken-and-egg problem.

This is not true, at all. Debian has like 50K packages, many of them extremely niche. Packaging is all about how difficult something is to build/package, not how popular it is. I've been a Linux distro packager for decades.

His program is a CLI only text editor. The people who both would specifically seek out a CLI text editor, and have needs that aren't being met by the numerous other CLI text editors available on Linux, are a much more technical userbase than the typical desktop computer user.

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