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Binary deb packages are extremely simple. It's just a cpio archive with a couple of tarballs & almost every system integration is implicit. Very easy to build by hand.

Last time I shipped a debian package to clients we just had the build system spit out a ready made binary .deb. Much, much easier than faffing about with dhbuild etc.

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My work workflow use `dpkg-deb`: I just create a "build/DEBIAN" directory, populate it with the control file and any post/pre scripts I need, put everything else in the "build" directory where it goes on the end filesystem and then do "dpkg-deb build ." I put all this into a script and do "fakeroot <SCRIPTNAME>".

I usually start with the `dh_make` generated skeleton and incrementally add overrides as I iterate with `gbp buildpackage`. It's not pretty, but it's what I know.

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