Quoting Steve Litt (slitt@???):

> I'm the originator and 2 year maintainer of the VimOutliner project.
> The Debian package substituted a double backslash \\ for the double
> comma ,, command prefix. When I said that the double comma was
> selected for speed purposes and that double backslash was a huge
> slowdown, the Debian maintainer gave me this song and dance about
> customary defaults in Debian and Vim. Meanwhile, as "upstreams", we
> were forever asked to debug Debian installations because they didn't
> work. After a few attempts, we just told them Uninstall your Debian
> VimOutliner and install from our tarball. That was the quickest fix.

As our Aussie friends say, 'Good on ya.' Thanks for VimOutliner.

During that period, it would have been a fine and good thing (if you
felt like it) for you to produce a .deb and publish it at an
apt-compatible repo URL. Nobody has any right to demand this, and
people should be grateful for your work -- but IMO in general installing
from upstream tarballs _if there is a reasonable alternative_ is
a very bad idea and should be strongly discouraged for new Linux users,
for many individually compelling reasons. During the long period when I
was one of the main editors for _Linux Gazette_, I wrote about this
several times (often as an editorial footnote to well-intended articles)
to make sure our readers were not mislead by bad advice, such as here:

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/weatherwax.html#1

As you know, Steve, I am an avid and appreciative reader of your
technical articles -- but one of the things you frequently urge on
readers that I feel is misguided is (IMO) urging immediate resort to
upstream tarballs in cases where this is _not_ necessary and not the
best choice.

(To phrase my specific point about VimOutliner a different way, you do
the free-software world a notable favour by maintaining VimOutliner, and
the correct comment first and foremost is 'Thank you', so: Thank you.
If you felt like helping people even more, helping them better, and
helping more people, taking that small extra step using debhelper to
create a package would also be cool.)

OTOH, there certainly are cases where dispensing with the extra work of
making a package is perfectly reasonable because there isn't enough
advantage to justify the extra work. An init system and/or supervisor
such as runit would probably be a good example of that. (I noted these
exceptions in the last two paragraphs of my footnote.)