As for building packages for your own use, the tooling is not that difficult. The documentation is just oriented to contribute packages for Debian itself. This

As for building packages for your own use, the tooling is not that difficult. The documentation is just oriented to contribute packages for Debian itself. This implies some unwanted complexity and navigating outdated documentation. Packaging for Debian becomes simpler, but it's heavily rooted into having multiple files describing the package, use of a tarball as the source package and having each language comes with its own helper and documentation. Here is a "pragmatic" way to write Debian packages without relying on non-Debian tools: https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2019-pragmatic-debian-packaging https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2019-pragmatic-debian-pack... (I am the author). But other than that, I quite agree with your stance: we (Debian) makes life of our contributors harder than it should be. Unfortunately, there is no awareness in the project for that. People trying to change that just silent themselves, like https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin....