On the other hand, those documents are well organized and clearly written, which makes skipping around to just the parts you need rather easy. A wealth of examp

On the other hand, those documents are well organized and clearly written, which makes skipping around to just the parts you need rather easy. A wealth of example material and helper tools (e.g. lintian) are also available, and all the policy changes are versioned and described as human-readable diffs[1], so the cost of catching up if you haven't been following progress for a few years is quite low. I think my first simple debian package was working within a few hours, and I was tackling more complex stuff within a few days. Not bad for a system that can handle the oddball installation requirements of just about any software, while also accounting for many install/configure/upgrade/downgrade/reinstall/remove edge cases. I'll grant that it is a complicated system, and there's a lot of legacy stuff beneath the higher-level tools. I suppose my point is that the vast majority of the complexity turns out to be avoidable in most cases, and getting started is not as hard as it looks. [1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist.html https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/upgrading-checklist...