LÖVE

About the "stream" concept for linux there is djl (made in python and qt4) , unfortunately the development is made in French and the website is not up to date (there are more recent releases) http://djl.tuxfamily.org/

More easily, it should be possible to create a launcher for löve developpers, like the one for renpy http://www.renpy.org , with a text editor (the same used in the renpy launcher, scite, could be a good idea because it's cross platform and has support for lua : http://scintilla.sourceforge.net/SciTELua.html). From this launcher, the developpers could load their projects, and generate the differents versions of their game, for mac os x, linux and windows (and the .love version alone).

If I may?

As I said before, I still don't think the LÖVE Engine should carry thousands of lines of code just to ease the installation to "stupid" people and supply tasks of web based project centrals and package managers. Why do you people want to make your project the whole OS?

I pretty agree with the idea of embedded Löve executables for each platform and .love file for the others.

And I suggest one more thing. Consider the way the rubyscript2exe works. It makes standalone executable with interpretor and all files used in your program and no more. But the best is that you can extract, modify, add, and even repack the content of the executable. And you don't need more then the executable itself to do it. For those who are more interested argument ---eee-justextract.

http://www.erikveen.dds.nl/rubyscript2exe

Great Developers of LÖVE: How about adding some demo like splash screens (mode7, sinescroller) and let people to to choose them in configuration file or header so they don't have to write their own if they don't want to or can't. << me

As you mentioned PhysFS is able to read zip data that is appended to the file, so the only thing to implement is a way for the binary to detect it contains an internal love file and use that. As "compiler" you could use some kind of dd utility (in linux) or you could even do something like (in windows). That wouldn't be the hardest to implement, I think there are even some zip utility's that can just read them from exe's.

And argv[0] is a quite good way to detect if it's not love.exe but you could also do something that detects if there is an argument (the love file I mean, the program name is always there), if not it tries to load from itself, in which case you would even be able to use a "packed" game as engine for your own.
So I guess it's pretty easy to implement, compared to creating löve itself (well, maybe that's just because I'm to lazy to read the documentation for all those API's).