Managing packages for arbitrary Linux distributions

[Mayuresh <mayuresh%acm.org@localhost>]

I have been a part of an academic research group that has built High-Level
Synthesis framework for VLSI design. We wish to make the framework
available to students, researchers and prospective users to try and use in
their work.

So far we have been using docker images for this. While this works as a
short term solution, say for lab work for a course, or just for preview
purpose, for more serious users, it will be good to have the tools build
on their systems natively.

I was thinking of creating a wip package of the toolset to make it easy to
build on various systems.

It's reasonable to assume that the users would have some flavor of Linux
or Cygwin, on amd64 systems. However, the users may not be skilled or
inclined enough to bootstrap pkgsrc and build the packages on their own.

So, what are some of the ways to make binary distributions that work for
at least some of the widely used Linux distributions? For example, can we
host a bootstrap image to get the basic pkgsrc environment and host the
binary packages that can then be installed over it? Would we need separate
bootstrap images and package tarballs for various Linux distros?

What are some of the pain areas and some best practices to manage such
software package distribution?

-- 
Mayuresh