Debian packaging basics aren't hard once you know them, but starting from scratch, it's hard to collate the information. There's lots of stale information out t

Debian packaging basics aren't hard once you know them, but starting from scratch, it's hard to collate the information. There's lots of stale information out there (including the debian wiki) and disagreement about how to do it - debuild? dh_make? dpkg directly? tar/ar manually? Similarly, if you want a package up something without a Makefile, you may as well go home. My first packaging attempt was basically to install a tarball at a location (in-house use only), and it wasn't clear that I had to make a Makefile to do this first. And then you get introduced to the bizarre world of make with all of it's idiosyncratic rules and behaviours. Then you get to play with all the dpkg control files, and if you're using debuild, you have to avoid the lintchecker - because you can override lint rules... but the lint profile then disables overrides for some useful ones (the "install to /opt" rule gives me lots of spam). So now you need to learn about the lint-checker so you can do your own profile (or just disable it). Then, as takluyver says above, you get to add it to a repo so systems can access it... Once you know all this stuff, it seems pretty simple, but getting over that hump is difficult.