There is a massive proliferation of “simple package formats” these days like snappy and co… Sad signs of redundancy and NIH - None that are substitutes for a real package management system.
There’s an interesting project that hopes to simplify apt/rpm package builds from git and do so reproducibly. These are a replacement to pbuilder. Might be worth using.
One still needs a /debian and/or /rpm folder. Seems to work with makefiles. Usually with makefiles one has to keep a list of files in the source tree and where these should be installed on the system. In the Whonix case, I always avoided that hassle. With genmkfile there is no reason for that.
An advantage seems to be to automatically bump Debian changelog as per git tag.
With packpack one has to trust the docker container. (like a VM) So questions raise such as:
I doubt it is good for Whonix to be an early adapter here. Better to stick with standard Debian tools. Reproducible builds hopefully makes it into stretch and cowbuilder is supposed to be fast also.
Good to know. Yay for genmkfile 