Thank you for considering my question. First of all, I know who my clients will be and many of them will not be or have anything like system administrators. Many of them will be able to run a script and follow simple instructions, but do little else. The script + instructions is going to have to be as close to foolproof as possible.

My current experiment at writing an install script is simply a shell script and nothing else, because I have heard of package manager scripts, but don't know anything about them (yet). Since I am linking in libraries at compile time, I will have to have some method of automatically downloading these things accross a variety of Linux flavors.

At this point, the responses are a little over my head. It sounds from one of the responses like I could create a script of the .src.rpm type, which I could Google and learn about if it is a good idea. What I am trying to find out is whether I should continue with my shell script and within it make calls to Yum or Apt to install the required libraries, or whether a shell script is basically the wrong way to go. If I did use a package manager script, or some other type of script, where would I go to learn how to do it?

I am just an applications developer and Linux installation is a mystery to me.

Thanks again.

Brandon