> Packaging is actually a huge amount of effort if you try to package for all distros.

That's the neat part: You do not have too package for all the distro.

Just make your components easy to decouple with provided pkg-config (ideally) and a proper configuration mechanism.

No bundle, no hidden download or tangled vendored messy script.

Then it is easy to do: you can just provide the packages for your main targets (e.g Ubuntu, Redhat typically) and the community of other distros will take care of the rest.