There are a lot of ways to do this, from dead-simple to very complex.  It depends a lot on how much of the functionality of dpkg your package needs.

I roll deb packages for a lot of projects using Maven2 and the jdeb plugin; for any project using Maven2 to build, it's dead simple.

For relatively basic projects, the following process works OK:
1) create a subdirectory "build" to build from.
2) create the directories where your files need to go on the target system, pretend the "build" subdirectory from (1) is "/".
3) Create another subdirectory next to the first, call it "control"
4) Create a file in "control" called "control".
5) Edit the "control" file according to http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ch-dreq.en.html#s-control
6) in the build subdirectory find * -type f -exec md5sum '{}' \; >../control/md5sums
7) in the control directory, tar zcf ../control.tar.gz .
8) In the "build" subdirectory, tar zcf ../data.tar.gz .
9) create a file "debian-binary" in the parent directory with the contents "2.0\n" where \n is a newline.
10) in the parent directory, ar q some-package.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz

That should do it.

For more complicated setups, http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ch-dreq.en.html is the definitive starting point.

John wrote:
> I've been running ubuntu for awhile and I've compiled my own programs but I've never made my own package (deb file). I tried it once before on Fedora (rpm) years ago and it seemed to complicated. Can someone point me in the right direction on how to build my own packages?
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