for the first time we have one file you can download and run on any linux (the only requirement being that the architecture matches!).
This is a pretty big boon for people who want to use fish but sometimes ssh to servers, where they might not have root access to install a package. So they can just scp a single file and it’s available.

That is really nice, damn. We often don't have internet on the hosts we work with, so it's really painful to try to install a distro package. But we are able to SSH into them, so I might genuinely start just pushing Fish binaries onto the hosts we work with. Fish is particularly neat for this, because its defaults are so good.

cargo is great at building things, it is very simplistic at installing them. Cargo wants everything in a few neat binaries, and that isn’t our use case. Fish has about 1200 .fish scripts (961 completions, 217 associated functions), as well as about 130 pages of documentation (as html and man pages), and the web-config tool and the man page generator (both written in python).

Yeah, we've run into that problem, too. The most promising approach in my opinion is cargo-xtask, which is a really sad thing to say, because that's not a tool, it's just a pattern of how you can use Rust to write your own build tool. I've been hacking away at a library to try to eliminate pain points and common pitfalls with that, and I have been looking for other repos with complex packaging needs to try to see, if my approach holds up. Sounds like I've just met my final boss. 🙃