What's there now isn't too bad; compiling from source isn't impossible.
The compiling isn't hard, as long as you have the dev tools involved. What IS unintuitive is every casual Linux user having to use SVN. Not a good step up front for a newbie. He'll probably quit right there, and if not, the compiling will get him after that.
My recommendation:
1. In addition to SVN, make sure to bundle up stable Verge source packages (or at least the last SVN that worked). A simple tar or tar.gz would be fine; assume the user can extract.
2. The tar should contain the branch of Verge source code, yes, but that should be one level down in the archive. At the topmost level, instead, there should be a collection of simple scripts. Install, Uninstall, and Update.
3. The Update script will actually download the LATEST stable archive of Verge, and overwrite the branch /src directory.
4. The Install script will do the ./configure, make, make install stuff. It won't update; you must manually run Update to do that. (Why? If Install always updated, you could not install an older Verge, and sometimes you might want to do that.)
5. The Uninstall script will remove all installed Verge files from the PC.
All scripts would be fairly simple, since they just wrap the ./configure, make, make install stuff. Let them accept a command-line argument to pass to configure. (So I could do /home/me/Verge-3.whatever/Install.sh --prefix=/home/me/Verge and it would install Verge to my home directory as opposed to the /usr/bin).
The only catch would be when they don't have the dependencies. At that time, the best we can do is have a simple README.txt in the archive that explains what libraries they need to build Linux Verge, and also has the command line scripts needed for apt-get and yum (so that at least Ubuntu or Red-Hat users have an idea of what command they need to run to install the dependencies.)
Test case:
Joe downloads the Verge archive, and extracts it up. Inside the archive, he sees...
src/
README.txt
install.sh
uninstall.sh
update.sh
He reads the README. It tells him (he's using Ubuntu) to run an apt-get command to make sure he's got the dependencies ("Please run apt-get [whatever stuff here -- gcc, audiere-dev, sdl-dev, etc if you are on Ubuntu. For Red Hat users, run -- etc.") . He does so. The README tells him to run the Update script. It goes to V-RPG, checks for a new Verge, and downloads the archive (if there is one). Then it says "Verge source updated! Please run Install." He runs Install, it compiles Verge and places a copy in his /usr/bin.
Bam. Since Verge3 is in the path, that means whenever you switch to a Verge3 game folder and run Verge, it SHOULD run the game and config in the current directory, right?
It does avoid package management for good reason -- you're game devers, not package maintainers. You can't expect to maintain different binary and source packages for every Linux distribution. Just give the user an easy way to create his own binary, like Firefox's Linux install or Sun's Netbeans' Linux install (each of which use scripts and a custom installer from an archive, NOT a Linux package).
