Isn't this overly complicated for what amounts to what could be a single file with 7 lines of information, instead of 3-5 tar archives that contain a single file with 1-3 lines of information?

but still, that was a pretty interesting write up.

With regards to the other front-page story about attracting new Debian Developers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41599327 -

This article is great for understanding the deb format. Lots of tools can make deb archives e.g. https://fpm.readthedocs.io/ . However making a binary package for users is a quite different thing to making a deb suitable for inclusion in Debian itself. A debian source package is a tuple of three .dsc + .tar.gz + .debian.tar.gz files.

Isn't it time to use GNU Guix package manager ? https://guix.gnu.org/

weird timing! made my first .deb tonight...

I appreciate first principles, but i just used dkpg-deb --build