Ask HN: What do you want to see in Debian 10 (“buster”)?
HEADLINE: Easier way to create local packages<p>DESCRIPTION: My first distro was Debian. Then, for a while, I used Arch. But it kept irritating me with its total disregard for backwards-compatibility (symlinking /usr/bin/python to python3), coarse-grained packages (want to install QEMU PPC without pulling in every other architecture as well? too bad!), lack of debug packages (good luck rebuilding WebKit just to get stack traces after a SIGSEGV), and package versioning ignoring ABI incompatibilities (I once managed to disable the package manager by upgrading it without also upgrading its dependencies... and later cut off WiFi in a similar manner). So, when I finally trashed my root partition a few weeks ago, I decided to use the opportunity to return to Debian.<p>One thing I miss from Arch, though, is having an easy way to create a package. It's simply a matter of reading one manpage, writing a shellscript with package metadata in variables and two-to-four functions (to patch up the unpacked source, check the version, build it, and finally create a tarball), and then running `makepkg`. And it will just download the source code, check signatures, patch it, and build it in one step; it even supports downloading and building packages straight from the development repository. I took advantage of  it to create locally-patched versions of some software I use, while keeping it up to date and still under the package manager's control.<p>Contrast that with creating a .deb, where doing the equivalent seems to require invoking several different utilities (uscan, dch, debuild; though ) and keeping track of separate files like debian/control, debian/changelog, debian/rules and whatever else. All the tooling around building packages seems oriented towards distro maintainers rather than users. I'd love something that would relieve me of at least some of the burden of creating a local package from scratch.<p>DISTRIBUTION: unstable, I guess