I'm just having a hard time understanding best development practices for NetSuite. I've got a demo account and I've managed to make my script run by uploading it to the file cabinet, then manually creating a script record and script deployment. But I'm not sure how to make that all portable so I can install it on my client's site.

delzhand: You can create a bundle (sounds like you have). set the availability to shared. share it to the netsuite account ID of your client. From the client account, you can search for the bundle and install. There are more options along the way but i suggest reading suiteanswers or the help center on suitebundler and best practices.

I've been poring over the documentation, trying to figure out how to manage things here and it seems like I can only have local version control over the script file - everything else has to be handled through the netsuite ui?

sort of. the IDE will let you connect each project to a netsuite account. Once you manually create script records int the UI, you can then push your updates directly from the IDE. but that's basically it. versions are not stored in netsuite

Okay I think I understand it now. It's just so different from the open source world I'm used to. Thanks!