Best approach to writing a generic installer for a Linux application?

Question

We have a Linux server application that is comprised of a number of open-source tools as well as programs we\'ve written ourselves. Ideally we would like to be able to install t

Answer 1

Instead of the installer approach, I think a better way than having a single script that does it at install time is to have a build system which generates .deb or .rpm files suitable for installation on each system you have to support.

A poor man's way of going at that might be to use checkinstall, which creates packages from the files installed via 'make install'. So you'd build your app on each system and have the package magically created in the distro's native format.