"After building some useful piece of software, one has to decide how to best deploy it. In UNIX, the standard way to do that is by publishing the source code in .tar.gz format and requiring users to compile it.

In Debian there is an alternative: using a .deb package. With a .deb package, a single dpkg -i <package>.deb installs the software.

This article explains how to create and support a .deb package for a simple software maintained in git, by tracking the packaging scheme in a specific branch on the same repository."

http://lpenz.github.com/articles/debgit/index.html