Creating a package from software can be an intimidating experience. Under some circumstances it has to be because the goal of the packaging task is to automate the building, installing, and uninstalling of your software for users who have no interest in becoming familiar with compilers, build tools, or shell debugging; things that you can do in your sleep. The complexity of the task also has a lot to do with how much time has been spent designing the deployment aspect of your software. There are deployment issues such as binary relocatability, runtime configuration, dependencies, and platform portability that can make a packaging task a lot tougher if they are not handled properly in the software. In the next few chapters, we will illustrate packaging tasks from the very easy examples to some more complex ones in the later chapters. This chapter explains some important requirements that you need to consider when packaging software.