[hereonout2]

Scripts ending up in different places is nothing to do with Debian packaging though. It just puts them exactly where you tell it - you're in complete control of that.

If you're unaware, the FSH lays out some guidelines a lot of distros follow - /usr/bin is a good place for any executable coming from a package in my book.

Agree debuild can be opaque as it is really a wrapper around loads of dpkg-* scripts. Digging further into those helps but it's not obvious.

WRT git, I find it useful to get the entire repo as a tar.gz and treat it like an upstream source package. The have the Debian build stuff as a process on top of that.

This is how many packages are maintained for real in the distro (i.e. imagine being the package maintainer of redis or vim and do it that way). It kind of makes sense to me to follow the pattern as things are geared up for it.