I've managed to create packages "the debian way", on my Ubuntu machine (without scratchbox), using dh_make and dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot

I've basically followed the instructions here:
http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org/docu...to.html#link23

Using Ubuntu, the maemo icon is apparently not taken into account as it's not understood by the packager. date-util and vobject both had their setup.py in the tar.gz, so it was pretty straight-forward.

For future reference:
I've had to give the path to the .tar.gz to dh_make using -f (it was complaining if not given).
I've used the Makefile from the documentation, even for dateutil which had its own. Edited the control and copyright files (control should say the package depend on python2.5, python does not seem to exist on the tablets), did not touch the rules.
removed the dirs, *.ex and *.EX files as they are not used anyway.

For the content of the control and copyright, i mainly copied data coming from the dsc and copyright found on packages.debian.org

I've uploaded the two debs my tablet, installed them using dpkg -i as root, uninstalled them with apt-get to verify that there's no problem there.

I'll try to figure out what to upload to the extras-devel repository so that other python programmers can easily enjoy those packages for their project.

If someone knows a well documented and easy to understand page, I'm all ears

Note: thanks to George Kibardin (packager of python-beautifulsoup) who gave me the link to the documentation page and sent a quick and nice reply to my mail.