Well, I was trying to say exactly the opposite.
What you now propose is that the user downloads your “.deb” or “.rpm” package and installs its dependencies only. Then the user downloads and unpacks your “.tar.gz” file (where convenient).
However, it may well be that the dependencies for the “.tar.gz” file are different from these for the corresponding “.deb” and “.rpm”.
Simply call the file “MANIFEST.TXT” and always put it in the main directory (i.e. where the “LICENSE” file resides).
Afterwards, whenever someone asks what is needed, we can simply say … see the file which is included in your version of binary distribution.
A simple “MANIFEST.TXT” file for some Ubuntu binaries could look like:
# mandatory
sudo apt-get install \
gcc g++ \
lib1 lib2 lib3 ...
# optional
sudo apt-get install \
gfortran make cmake \
lib4 lib5 lib6 ...
The dependencies will be standard operating system packages so there should not be any problem (yes, you must not be very specific when preparing the list of packages, i.e. you can say “gcc” or “gcc-9” but better not “gcc-9.3.0-1ubuntu2”, same with libraries’ versions).
Actually, I could also imagine that one prepares a dummy “.deb” and “.rpm” packages which contain nothing except dependencies (but I still prefer a simple text file).
@amadio Well, “.rpm” packages can be made “relocatable”, so installing into user preferred “prefix” could easily be made available for e.g. CentOS and Fedora machines (the default “prefix” could be “/usr”, of course). Moreover, I think one can also install “.rpm” packages on Ubuntu and Debian (I’m not sure but possibly / hopefully “alien” is not needed). So, it should be possible to create “relocatable” packages for Ubuntu and Debian, too.