These are commercial software vendors, right? So you can lodge a support request with them and then call your sales person and tell him what a pain it is to deal with the tarballs they give you. It's not like you're making an unreasonable request when you say "make a package that installs easily on the number 1 corporate Linux distribution." For a while I was QA/CM in a small cross-platform software shop so we created java installers and had anyone asked for an RPM we certainly would have done it. It's not that hard... Greg
