[ Thanks to Jeremy Mack Wright for this link. ]
When making your custom scripts or software available
to someone else, it’s a good idea to make that content as easy to
extract and install as possible. You could just create a compressed
archive, but then the end user has to manually extract the archive
and decide where to place the files.Another option is creating packages (.deb, .rpm, etc) for the
user to install, but then you’re more locked into a specific
distribution. A solution that I like to use is to create a
self-extracting archive file with the makeself.sh script.