About this document

Deploying software on several UNIX/Linux distributions is quite burdensome: every distribution has its own packaging tools, standards, ...which makes the life of a developer harder. Most of the time, the packager is not the developer itself, since the first one is more able to know the particularities of the OS he is packaging for.

In this paper, we wanted to understand the differences between the three most used packaging systems (TBZ, DEB and RPM). We will go through the steps of packaging a standard program from writing the source code to installing it on several OS.