I've been building debian packages for OpenResty and its dependencies that are not already in the official Ubuntu debian repository. Here's what I got yesterday:

  http://agentzh.org/misc/debian/

For now only the i386 versions are provided :P I'll set up a personal debian repository for these deb files later.

During the process I found the following articles very helpful:

    "Building Debian packages of Perl modules" http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/78

    "Debian New Maintainer's Guide" http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/

But still, I spent a lot of time to figure out the following details:

For CPAN modules based on Module::Install, dh-make-perl seems to fail to find proper dependencies. In this case, one has to edit the file debian/control manually, as in

    http://svn.openfoundry.org/openapi/trunk/debian/control

If the CPAN module wants to install configure files to places like /etc/..., then it's required to manually create the file "conffiles" under debian/, as in

    http://svn.openfoundry.org/openapi/trunk/debian/conffiles

And then modify the debian/rules makefile's "install" rule to put the default config files to $(TMP)/etc/..., as in

    http://svn.openfoundry.org/openapi/trunk/debian/rules

Another hack I have to do against rules' "install" rule is that I have to remove the perllocal.pod file manually from $(TMP), since inclusion of this file in the .deb file will cause conflicts like this:

 dpkg: error processing libjson-xs-perl_2.22-1_i386.deb (--install):
  trying to overwrite `/usr/lib/perl/5.8/perllocal.pod', which is also in package libtext-table-perl

For modules which require doing some post-installation processing, we should create the file debian/postinst and put shell commands into it.