https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide - a little bit better than Debian's official one. Unfortunately the more you do it, the more you actually need to refer to the Debian's guide and see why it was written that way...

I also recommend checking out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PbuilderHowto - pbuilder is "the" way to build packages, which I unfortunately discovered very late.

To my knowledge no. I think this is one of the main problems in getting people to create system packages. I think this fosters the split between package maintainers and developers. It's not that the documentation is all bad, it's just not aimed at the audience I think it should be.

System packages just aren't what web savvy developers grew up on and the documentation feels out of step. But the capabilities and tools around system packages are awesome.

I might take a go a writing a simple guide, but I'd be more than happy to see other people have a go that know more than I do. Let me know if this sounds of interest.

Theres a great programme called checkinstall that gets you 90% there. Rather than running 'make install' run 'checkinstall', or rather than 'sudo python installscript.pt', run 'sudo checkinstall python installscript.py'

Checkinstall is brilliant: http://checkinstall.izto.org/

It's also guilty of being unattractive to the developers I'd love to see use it. The site says "Recent News: Dec 26th, 2009" and then concentrates on a NOTE TO SLACKWARE 8.0 USERS.

Showing the hello world of checkinstall would be much better imho, and it's what developers from the web world expect.

Checkinstall of Python and VirtualEnv is the only sane way I've found to do python development and deployment when you're developing on Maverick and deploying to Lenny.