[oblio]

A deb file is just an ar archive of 2 tgzs, one with metadata and one with the actual files.

Now, the tools that build them are a whole different kettle of fish.

Plus some stuff is really old school, ar is an archive format that nobody has used on its own since 1996, it's a sort of transparent bundler/archiver à la tar, I think it was originally used to bundle .so file into a bigger package but still have the symbols inside visible. I don't really remember all the details, it's been a while since I looked into .deb packages.

I think the main problem is that Debian is not a commercial project and it shows sometimes. The tooling is kind of "hidden" (you have to poke around the distribution, mailing lists, etc. to figure things out) and the processes are kind of the same thing. The docs on the site are ok in some regards but they're far from complete and up-to-date.

Meanwhile the Dockerfile format is reasonably well documented and the tooling is also quite straightforward. You can see that a company made it for a while its raison d'être and wanted to make it easy to use.