By the way, I should point out that our overall strategy of how to deal with "packaging and installation" issues is to use automation. The creation of packages such as Python .egg's, Debian .deb's, and Mac .dmg's is done automatically by our buildbot, and we also have tests run automatically by buildbots to see whether the resulting packages can be installed and run.

I'm sure that it isn't all there yet, and your bug reports would help, but you might be interested in the overall approach -- applying the principles of test driven development (if it isn't automatically tested by your buildbot, then it isn't done) to packaging.