Re:We already have a de-facto one. (Score 1)

I thing tar balls with their configure and make scripts are the best method for installing unless you are on a RedHat system (I use Slackware most of the time) The only problem is that most tar balls don't really have anything in them to remove the packages again if the install went wrong or the software simply is not needed anymore. You have to go in and clean up everything manually. One Unix which has a very nice package management system is AIX which would be useful to have under linux.