> why are you attempting to create the .deb yourself, instead of using Debian tooling. Can't you simply build dpkg under Arch and try to use it directly?
I *can* in fact already do that, as dpkg is already packaged and inside Arch Linux's repositories [1].
The reason I'm wanting to do it manually is that I'm appearing to get quite a bit of a speed gain from doing so. On relatively tiny packages, it doesn't make much of a difference, but as I'm creating more bulky-sized packages, the difference is appearing to make more and more of a difference.
It doesn't appear to be some kind of placebo effect either - running 'time dpkg -b package/' has always shown to be churning out a package slower than 'time /script.sh', where 'script.sh' would contain, again, the commands found in my project [2].
Lastly, to wrap it all up then: This isn't a problem with the available tools on any given distro, but rather a problem with speed that I'm wishing to solve (likewise by creating the package manually, but alas the size issue with APT is still cropping up).