Aschwin,

As you can probably guess, to date we've only built our redistributables (.exe, .zip, and .tar.gz) on a Windows machine.

Additionally, we didn't consider building the redistributables from the source distribution. This is a valid thing to want to do, so I entered https://cpas.fhcrc.org/Issues/home/issues/details.view?issueId=3049 to track that request.

I'd recommend commenting the call to the installers target in the "build" target in installers/build.xml. That should prevent it from trying to build the Windows .exe installers using makensis.exe and should let you generate a full .tar.gz distribution.