Using Flatpak to distribute MC might actually be useful, especially for those non-Debian OSes that don't use .deb/APT or OSes with out-of-date libraries. Almost all the modern distros support Flatpak out-of-the-box... well, except Ubuntu (at least not without a PPA) because they have their rival Snappy (though honestly, IMO, Flatpak is the better of the two). The obvious benefit here is one MC package could be distributed which would work on every single Linux distro that supports Flatpak... which is nearly all of them. Debian Stretch supports Flatpak, Fedora 23+ supports Flatpak, Linux Mint 18.3+ supports Flatpak, Arch Linux Supports Flatpak, openSUSE supports Flatpak, Solus supports Flatpak, etc. The list goes on and on.
Bob, I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.
https://flatpak.org/https://flatpak.org/hello-world.html