When I packaged software, I did RPM for Fedora and openSUSE (because that’s what I used at that time) but out of curiosity I looked at .deb as well and boy are there weird things there.

There are many similarities between RPM and pkgbuild for Arch, so I could easily copy almost entire pkgbuilds from AUR and merely adapt a few variables but whatever the inventors of .deb concocted is crazy. Archives within archives and other stuff I actively repressed memories of.

I looked at .deb as well and boy are there weird things there.

There are many similarities between RPM and pkgbuild for Arch, so I could easily copy almost entire pkgbuilds from AUR and merely adapt a few variables but whatever the inventors of .deb concocted is crazy.

That build method dates back super-far, and probably mirrors unix packaging of the day. This is not a good thing, in that it did miss out on some validation features that RPM and NIX have, and that’s a problem that hasn’t been fixed (in unix or debian) even now (25+ years after we noticed it in the enterprise OS company I worked at, and which invalidated debian even then as a product we wanted to support alongside unix).

Agreed OP needs to stop being a lazy bitch and just use a script to package their app for all distros. It’s really not that difficult. AppImage is fine for universal formats or portability.