how to create a self extracting tarball?

[bob 295]

I'm trying to streamline the installation of a tarball for an open source 
project I maintain.    Currently the users manually undo the tarball and then 
manually execute a build script from within that tarball.  eg.

tar -zxvf simpl.3.2.1.tar.gz
simpl/scripts/buildsimpl

I'd like to simplify things to the point that the user downloads a file called 
"simpl.3.2.1" and then installs it by typing that file name.  ie. simpl.3.2.1

Any ideas how I could go about this?

Certainly I could build in some self extraction and autolocation logic into a 
higher level script which I bundle into my tarball and call it "installer".   
The process simplifies a little to:

tar -zxvf simpl.3.2.1.tar.gz installer
./installer

but that doesn't meet my goal of a self extracting file.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

bob

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists