Make your own packages for Debian-based systems

I have made many debs using checkinstall and debian infrastructure and I think this article hides the difficulties with the second option.

If you use checkinstall you don't do dependency control (amongst other things) so debian infrastructure is very desirable particularly if you want to keep the deb long term. This article doesn't point out how difficult setting up such infrastructure can be. In particular isolating all the dependencies of a large package can be nightmarish. Also setting up proper initialization scripts is often non-trivial. If you have a look inside the debian subdirectory for many big packages you can appreciate better all the work package maintainers do.

I don't think glib statements without real help do the community much service.

It's actually pretty easy - check out the Debian New Maintainer's Guide. It'll explain how to automate pretty much everything including generating the dependencies. I'd recommend using the cdbs system for packaging as it takes care of a lot of the crap involved automatically if you're packaging an autotoolized program.

Yeah I looked at that and tried it out on the lyx set of packages. All the dependencies were not generated automatically (many were I grant you) and I had to go in manually a whack a whole bunch in.