[sgtcodfish]

This mirrors my experience, too. Building a simple RPM isn't too bad, even if spec files are a little arcane. Packaging for the AUR isn't super complicated as far as I've seen.

The "standard" way to build even the simplest deb file seems super overcomplicated whenever I've tried to do it, with layers of complexity, shims and fudges.

For most simple stuff you just want to specify a bit of metadata, a couple of install scripts and specify "X goes in /usr/bin/X, Y goes in /usr/share/...".

I tend to find that fpm (https://fpm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) does that for me, and I now use it for building my own deb files pretty much everywhere.