Making .deb packages

[jdgamble <jdgamble@comcast.net>]

I'm not sure if this is the right group to post to, but I am trying to
learn how to make deb packages and I seem to go around in circles
confusing myself.

I am following this HowTo
http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/ and I keep getting errors from
lintian and linda that I do not know how to fix.

When I was first going through the howto I only deleted the files that
they suggest I delete if I wasn't using them, then when I ran lintian or
reading it somewhere it said something about deleting the stuff I'm not
using.  

I am new to this whole thing of creating deb packages.  I am trying to
make a deb file from the source of http://gotmail.sf.net so that they can
post it with their sf project files.  I will also need to know how to
include a "deb" definition for their "make deb" command from the makefile.
 Right now the makefile has this for the rpm definition so when you run
 "make rpm" it creates the rpm

rpm:    tarball
        rpmbuild --define "_rpmdir `pwd`" -tb $(APPNAME)-$(RELEASE_NUM).tar.gz
        mv noarch/*.rpm .
        rmdir noarch

I also ran across the pkgwrite utility which I thought would make it easy,
but I'm confused by the documentation.  http://pkgwrite.sourceforge.net/

Any kind of help, pointing to any tutorials, etc. would be great...I'm not
trying to take an easy way out I just am very new to all this and want to
do it the right way.