jriegel wrote:Building distro packages is a lost battle, even for the big ones. I'm still think thats the work of the distro maintainer!
We deliver the tar package end they pull from us.
How many times have we discussed this?

I do not agree. Distros have their own release cycles and you can wait a very long time to see the latest FreeCAD release in the distros' repos. Look at Ubuntu, 13.04 came out in April, 3 months after 0.13.1830 was released, yet the 18-month old v0.12.5284 is still there. Ubuntu 12.04 will be maintained until 2017 and I'm willing to bet money it will still have the by then prehistoric v0.12 in its repos!
It's worse with other distros. If we leave this to those distro maintainers FreeCAD will never be up to date and this will be detrimental to Linux users. Not every Linux end-user is up to the task of compiling.
And why the double standard? FreeCAD provides installers for Windows, why not provide only a tarball like for Linux and the hell with it?
With some much needed help from Werner at the beginning and some occasional help from him now and then, I am now providing Ubuntu packages so you guys don't have to. What would be most useful would be for other volunteers to join in and take care of at least the other major distros, and do it in a regular manner. Obviously more easily said than done.