I have an addon that I'm developing for my guild, and to keep things organized I split it into several files.
Using dofile() to load them all works very well, and it helps a lot to split the code into logical pieces.

However, multiple files are harder to distribute, so I put them all in a .tar file.
Hence my suggestion:

Might we have a packaging format to bundle up our addons?
tar is good as it has no compression, but I'm fine with zip, arj, rar, 7z or any of the major formats.

Pretty please?

They'd have to go with something that's un-patent-encumbered (ie: nothing using Lempel-Ziv-based compression schemes), so tar (or gzipped tar) would probably work. It might be a pita, though, especially on platforms like Windows which are unlikely to have convenient built-ins.

WinRAR does tar effortlessly, but it's non-free...