[brokenparser]

You don't need those virtual machines if you use pbuilder. All builds will run under the same kernel but if it's affected by that you're doing weird things. Also, your package shouldn't depend on any meta package as it's bad style (what if that package drops a dependency you relied on?). A good package lists only the bare minimum dependencies needed to get it to work (but under Debian may recommend and suggest other packages to go along with it).

[SwellJoe]

I read about pbuilder, but couldn't figure out how to make it work. Again, the documentation for the apt-get/deb ecosystem is awful. If I thought I knew how any of it worked, I'd write new docs...but, our Debian/Ubuntu repos are awful (they work fine for end users, but they are awful to maintain...I must be doing it wrong because it's so slow to regenerate and requires so much human involvement, but I don't know how to do it right). And, not only are the docs difficult or non-existent, the tools aren't very discoverable. Once I knew mock existed, I was able to get it up and running mostly by playing with it and looking at examples. I wasn't able to figure that out with pbuilder.

A quick googling just now revealed the Ubuntu wiki has what looks like good documentation for pbuilder, so I may be able to make it work now. It doesn't actually look that difficult (though it seems to require pretty advanced shell scripting for some things that seem like they ought to be in there with a command line switch or a config file option, but my reading of it was cursory and it may just be a weird bit of showing off in the docs, and shell scripting isn't actually a necessary part of the process). But, with truly awful docs, as they existed when I was trying to use it several years ago, I couldn't make it go.

I really don't hate apt-get as much as all of this makes it sound like I do. As a user, apt-get it fine. As a maintainer, I find it extremely frustrating. If the docs were better, I'd probably like it more (though not as much as RPM/yum...the simplicity of maintaining packages for a yum repo is really hard to beat).