Until now MediaGoblin has generally been run from a git source checkout. That's useful for developers, but it doesn't align well with OS-packaging, which has strong separation between the build, install and run phases - often done at different times, in different contexts and by different people.
With OS-packaging there is typically some sort of built distribution asset/package that doesn't require arbitrary internet access other than for the package manager to download the package and any dependency packages.
I don't know that I fully have my head wrapped around the issues and implications here, but my intuition is that the discipline imposed by the OS-packaging requirements is probably going to be good for us.
Being interpreted, Python does blur the typical build/install/run lines. Why shouldn't you be able to modify the source directly if you want to, without having an explicit build/install step if it's not required. That's certainly widely done in PHP and in professional deployment of Python web applications.
We certainly want MediaGoblin installation to be simpler than it is currently - at present you need significant technical experience to install and maintain it.
What brought this issue up for me is that currently someone installing from our deployment docs gets whatever version is in the "stable" branch, which quite likely isn't an explicit release, just whatever git commit happened to be there at the time.
On the other hand, it means we can just push changes to "stable" and anyone installing will get the latest version without us having to make an explicit release.