[Everdred2dx]

Guessing that this is the result of years (or decades?) of incremental changes maintaining backwards compatibility.

[elcritch]

I wouldn’t agree that it’s overly complicated. Compare it to the Docker/OCI container format with multiple layers of tarballs and complicated manifest.json files. The deb format appears much simpler.

[Timber-6539]

Docker is just like Debian in this instance. It would give you a base system from where you create the package using the same exact steps.