No risk on my part. I have a vested interest in the debs as they are used in my test chain, and updates to the debs are a fully automated affair that has effectively zero maintenence effort, on zero cost infrastructure. I have no reason to change any of this.

I suspect I could fairly easily add other distros, but demand is either not there, or covered by others.

Snap/flatpak is a different matter. Also likely easy to add, and I understand the conceptual appeal, but historically they didn't seem to be easily supportable, and that seems undesirable to me.

This situation has not changed and is not at all likely to change. I have at some point tried to build Debian native packages, but never got it to work. It means you have to build the firefox base from source, and that means I would have to do a build of the firefox sources. That means the Zotero team cannot trust that the binaries are the same as the ones they publish, which means they cannot realistically support them.

There is one possibility -- a shallow package like the java package that consists only of a script that downloads the Zotero binaries tarball at install time and not before, and then during install performs all the actions needed (copy/replace files, set rights, etc), and at uninstall would be scripted to remove all files it placed. I tried that too but it'd mean I would have to do all the checks that apt does, check for errors encountered during install, etc, and the package would not list the zotero files as part of the installation. The current setup is just more robust.

@adamsmith I would say that is the least of the issues.

First, Debian users wouldn't be imposed to use Debian repositories versions, as it is common with many software, where beyond being in Debian repositories, may have versions in their own repositories and even may offer deb packages to be installed through dpkg or apt, other binary formats or the source codes.

And for those using Debian repositories versions, I believe they are conscious that the place to report issues are the Debian maintainer(s), and if doing here, they can choose between the Debian-patience or get from Zotero webpage.

Beyond that, I believe the rhythm for updating the most recent version through the release channel would depend on the maintainer(s), so not necessarily would be slow.

@emilianoeheyns Thanks. That’s the answer I was expecting. For me, using the repository for Debian and its derivatives is easier for installing and especially updating Zotero than using the official tarball.