What tools exist for building debian packages for deployment purposes?

Question

I would like to build .deb files of my application, so that I can deploy onto a remote server, using all the dependency-resolution features of Debian. My application is a set of mostly-Python scripts, plus some configuration files, and some binary blobs, but most of the existing documentation that talks about Source and Binary packages seems oriented around C applications that need compiling.

What tools should I be looking at?

Answer 1

The basics are here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PythonRecipes/DebianPackage

And a more automated way using stdeb, an extension for python's distutils or pgkme, which is a bit newer but more ubuntu oriented.

Stani Michiels held a very good presentation at PyCon 2010, with their experiences with their cross platform photo batch processor (phatch), which includes how they got the software accepted by the debian repositories, which includes what you want to achieve (and a bit more).