[chousuke]

Building distribution packages really doesn't take all that much effort if your build system is sane, and once the initial work is done, your CI will let you know when maintenance is needed.

When you're building your own packages, you can reasonably take shortcuts that distros would not allow (like internet access during build, or vendoring some tricky dependencies), so for many things the packaging just amounts to specifying your dependencies, running your build, and perhaps applying some distro-specific tweaks.

[nly]

This is true, but a lot of the Debian tools are open source biased in that they really don't want you putting together binary packages that install things in to /opt, and don't provide a super convenient way to determine binary package dependencies without going through one of the debhelper build scripts