creating source tarballs [linux]

Hi,

I plan to publish an Qt application. However, I don't really know which possibilities there are to create the source tarball, which one is the easiest, which one is the best etc. The app should basically be installed into some bin directory (/usr/bin or whatsoever) and create a menu entry, if possible.
Most applications can be build by executing ./configure && make && make install. As I've been looking for some applications in kde-apps.org, I saw that a lot of developers use cmake instead. What's the difference? Can cmake do the whole job (creating an executable in /usr/bin, creating menu-entries...)?
I usually use eclipse when I build applications. It uses qmake and make. afaik, these two tools cannot create menu entries etc., so would do I need there additionally? In case I use a configure-script, could I somehow use the make-script created by qmake, or do I have to create a whole new one?
I know it's the most comfortable for any user to have a package belonging to his distribution, but I want to publish the tarball in addition and I want it to be installed as best as possible, i.e., with menu entries and an executable somewhere in $PATH

Thanks.

also with qmake you can move your executable to a "bin" directory. That's not the problem. For normal I would provide the sources as a simple tar.gz (or bz2) archive. And you can make some binary installation files too. With rpm and deb you will reach the main linux distributions.