[onli]

It's not horrible advice, and none of the links is helpful if you want to achieve the stated goal in the article: Simply distributing a binary.

It's completely fine to package them in a deb. You especially should know that debs are really simple and work quite well for that. You place the binary along with the needed resource files (configuration for example) in the relative directory structure, add a minimal amount of meta information, and call one command to create the .deb. Easy and fast, and the result is very reliable, it will work everywhere.

And then you have the official way of abstraction over abstraction, "explained" with completely unreadable documentation, needing a dozen helper tools and environment variables, guided by documentation that fails to explain even just the basics of what it is you'd actually do if you followed that documentation.

No, the simple way shown by the submitted article is exactly correct.

Start with that. If it works, then you maybe take the next step later and set up a PPA, assuming the deb is not only for yourself.

[hordeallergy]

The second half of your comment is exactly the experience I recently had when trying for the first time. I quit and built a container image instead.

[growse]

I think it's bad advice, but not necessarily for the same reason. For the simple case of "I want to distribute a binary", there are far easier ways to make a deb - I use FPM, but there are other tools that will also do it in a one-liner.

For someone new to this, the article's 5-steps are certainly not "practical".

[onli]

Well, a binary often needs at least one configuration file, so it's probably not just that. I think it's easy enough: You just precreate the directory structure, place the files, add DEBIAN/control, and then it's one command. If it can be even easier that's really cool :)