[ldolse]

I agree with you conceptually, but on the flip side Calibre's approach in this case actually encourages development and contribution more than any other open source projects I've worked on. The fact that you don't need to build a bunch of dependencies makes Calibre incredibly easy to contribute too.

I don't think it's a matter of secrecy that building the package from scratch is difficult, though Kovid may be better able to comment on that - I think it's just more about convenience and priorities.

I think it may also be partly Apple's fault - most open source projects completely fail at building easy to use Apple installer packages even when there are Windows and Linux binaries, and I think it's at least somewhat common that the source tree doesn't provide the capability to build a DMG package, but I may be wrong.

BTW, last time I built Calibre from source was on Linux - and that was very easy - the other issue with Mac is you often need a homebrew/Macports/fink recipe for each dependency in order to get a successful build - that can be incredibly tedious to put all those pieces together.