I was surprised to not find more people asking this question, but so far I've only found one from a couple of years ago, with not much in the way of responses.
First, some background on what I'm actually trying to accomplish here: I am working on a custom spin of Edubuntu designed for use by educational nonprofits in low/no-bandwidth locations. The server would need to come pre-configured in some specific ways, and I need a reliable way to provide updates to those configurations without having direct access to the systems. Thus, a .deb repository that can be put on a USB drive if necessary seems like a reasonable solution.
It looks like the packagename.install file wants you to specify every file and dir that you want to include in your package individually. For a package that just places or updates files on a system, this seems like overkill (and quite tedious if you have a lot of files/dirs), as opposed to having something like this your build dir:
fs/
|-etc/
|-apache2/
|- conf.d/
|- some_custom_settings.conf
|-var/
|-www/
|-html/
|- some_custom_page.html
AND SO ON
and then having the "build" process basically just be rsync -a fs/ /
...but then, that also seems a bit hacky, which makes me wonder if I'm either missing something or just using the wrong tool for the job.
Of course, I could just suck it up and use the more tedious packagename.install approach to make .debs, or maybe I should look into something like Puppet instead, assuming there's a way to push updates to disconnected systems in that scenario. Or maybe just a git repo?
Basically, I'd welcome any suggestions, whether via .debs or something else.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can answer!