Each time I need to package some software as .deb, I am not able to do it in one go. Because it is always a quite complex procedure that requires quite a lot of knowledge and context and you have to learn a lot of tools (million of debhelper tools, dpkg, debuild etc). It is designed to be comfortable for “large-scale” debian package maintainers who maintain a lot of packages for the Debian project, but is not very friendly for “indie” developers working on their own projects. And the process may vary a lot depending on what kind of software you need to package (what language, is it a library or shell tool or GUI etc). Also it strictly recommends that debian packaging files are stored separately from the software repo which might be somewhat inconvenient for small projects. We are going to include the debian directory into the project.