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I would agree that Debian packaging is unnecessarily complicated. The raw stuff is tedious, so various wrappers have been created. In the wild you see a mixture

I would agree that Debian packaging is unnecessarily complicated. The raw stuff is tedious, so various wrappers have been created. In the wild you see a mixture of wrappers and lower level packaging, making everything more complicated for the occasional user. I started with Debian (not as a packager, but just as a technical user who occasionally wants to do his own stuff). Years later I was forced to use rpm and was suprised that things could be so straight-forward. Yet years later I was forced to look at Arch and was suprised again: Hey, you can understand all of it just in a couple of hours. Accumulated experience might result in a slightly biased perception. But I still believe the described gradient exists.

zxzax 5y ago
I can't say I agree with that conclusion, if you're just applying a patch then you don't need to edit the low level packaging. It doesn't affect the occasional user at all.
- seba_dos1 5y ago
  To be honest, you still do need to grok the difference between native and quilt packages, and, in case of the latter, know that you need to put your patches into `debian/patches/` instead of directly modifying the source tree. And if you started by cloning the packaging from a git repo, you may need to know what pristine-tar is as well. A well-written tutorial will explain that to you quickly, but there's definitely more friction than with PKGBUILD files where you can pretty much just look at the contents of the file and edit it directly without second thoughts.