A commentator on my entry on why Debian and RPM (source) packages are complicated suggested looking at Arch Linux packaging, where most of the information is in a single file as more or less a shell script ( example ). Unfortunately, I'm not a fan of this sort of shell script or shell script like format, ultimately because it's only declarative by convention (although I suspect Arch enforces some of those conventions). One reason that declarative formats are important is that you can analyze and understand what they do without having to execute code. Another reason is that such formats naturally standardize things, which makes it much more likely that any divergence from the standard approach is something that matters, instead of a style difference.

Being able to analyze and manipulate declarative (source) packaging is useful for large scale changes within a distribution. The RPM source package format uses standard, more or less declarative macros to build most software, which I understand has made it relatively easy to build a lot of software with special C and C++ hardening options. You can inject similar things into a shell script based environment, but then you wind up with ad-hoc looking modifications in some circumstances, as we see in the Dovecot example .

Some things about declarative source packages versus Arch style minimalism are issues of what could be called 'hygiene'. RPM packages push you to list and categorize what files will be included in the built binary package, rather than simply assuming that everything installed into a scratch hierarchy should be packaged. This can be frustrating (and there are shortcuts), but it does give you a chance to avoid accidentally shipping unintended files. You could do this with shell script style minimal packaging if you wanted to, of course. Both RPM and Debian packages have standard and relatively declarative ways to modify a pristine upstream package, and while you can do that in Arch packages, it's not declarative, which hampers various sorts of things.

Basically my feeling is that at scale, you're likely to wind up with something that's essentially as formulaic as a declarative source package format without having its assured benefits. There will be standard templates that everyone is supposed to follow and they mostly will, and you'll be able to mostly analyze the result, and that 'mostly' qualification will be quietly annoying.

(On the positive side, the Arch package format does let you run shellcheck on your shell stanzas, which isn't straightforward to do in the RPM source format.)