The DEB format is powerful and has a lot of conveniences for Debian Developers (eg, it does lots of things automatically for you to reduce boilerplate). Unfort

The DEB format is powerful and has a lot of conveniences for Debian Developers (eg, it does lots of things automatically for you to reduce boilerplate). Unfortunately, it’s not easy to discover what automatic things are happening and what they’re doing. (If you look at the debian files for a package without packaging knowledge, you often can’t tell how the package is made. Arch Linux PKGBUILD files for example are much easier to understand without prior knowledge.) This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the documentation is poor as well, which means the barrier to entry is artificially high. At least that was my impression from a few years ago. Maybe things are better now.