Creating installer with external extension modules

["Martin v. Löwis"]

> Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to approach this?

For the Mac, I recommend to provide precompiled binaries to your users,
rather than requiring them to download various source packages, to run
your build-it-all script afterwards.

To distribute a package on the Mac, you could study the Mac package
format - however, providing a tar file of all files needed should
work just as well.

For Linux, you could do the same thing, provided you can standardize
on a single distribution, and on packages that should have been
installed before (if you are using Debian, you'll find that many
of the packages you have as prerequisites are already available for
Debian with the standard release). Again, you can try to create
packages according to the package management format of your Linux
distribution (i.e. either RPM or .deb).

If you go for the "native binary packages", your users will enjoy
easy installation, and, for Linux, also convenient deinstallation
(for Mac, you can get easy deinstallation if you put everything in
a single root directory).

Regards,
Martin