[codys]

I totally agree. I'm amazed by how opaque and difficult to understand the process to create debian packages is because of all the various layers/helpers/tools that can/should be used in different cases and the difficulty in customizing things. There's a slew of interacting tooling (`dpkg`,`dpkg-buildpackage`, `debhelper`, each of the debhelper `dh-*` helpers, `sbuild`, `pbuilder`, `git-buildpackage`) that all has different documentation of varying quality, some of it replaces other pieces, etc.

My best experiences with packaging on linux have been gentoo ebuilds & arch pkgbuilds. These keep the build model pretty straight forward if the goal is to "just build a package".

That said: creating a dpkg is not an impossible thing to do. It's just more painful than it needs to be