What's the use case for 1)? It sounds like a peculiar situation to get into. As for 2), if you ignore the parts of the tooling which are primarily for buildin

What's the use case for 1)? It sounds like a peculiar situation to get into. As for 2), if you ignore the parts of the tooling which are primarily for building and publishing Debian itself and only use the bits which are oriented around building a .deb, it's remarkably simple. What sucks is the documentation, I suspect because Debian doesn't want people to know anything other than "the right way". What's right for Debian isn't necessarily right for anyone else's organisation, but figuring out which parts of the tooling usefully stand alone is not easy.