At my last company, I built debs for our software (which was only distributed on our hardware, and customers didn't interact at the system level at all), and I

At my last company, I built debs for our software (which was only distributed on our hardware, and customers didn't interact at the system level at all), and I just wrote a shell script to make them manually. Just take your data and control directories and the debian-binary file, and wrap them up in an ar archive. You'll have to learn how to write a control file by hand, but that's easy. The cool thing is that building the packages manually is distro-agnostic. No need for a VM or anything. Most of our stuff was in Java or Python, so even though our hardware ran Ubuntu, I'd develop and build the packages on my Arch machine before pushing to the device for testing. We eventually automated things some more, storing the data and control directories in SVN, with a simple GUI running on the device (we did not distribute this tool to customers) to pull down a package from SVN, build it, and install it on the device, using something based on the SVN revision number as the package version. That led to a pretty good workflow. We'd make a change, commit it into the dev branch of our packages repo, then go over to the device and push a button to pull it down.