Is there any tool for graphical packaging, or a similar easy to use thing?

I compiled AisleRiot for the 770 as it seems to be missing for 2006, and it is running fine on my 770 (in fact I have played it to death over the last few days), so as there were other requests for it, I thought it would be good to package it up and put it somewhere.
Then I looked at the bits on packaging!

I must say I am 'new again' to the linux world (I used to use it back in the 90s) and am very surprised that although it has really moved on in leaps and bounds in some regards (I was very impressed at umbuntu linux - actually seems like a very competent operating system for a technical person), it seems to have gone nowhere from a developer point of view.

Making an installer for something like AisleRiot for the mac or PC would be a trivial 5 minute job that someone with no experience of the platform could come in and do but it seems so much harder for (debian) linux. Although I guess as getting the whole environment setup was also a bit of a tooth-extracting process, maybe I am just not getting the linux way.

All I really want is something I can add the binary to, all the support files, the guile library and support files (assuming it is not there, which it wasn't on mine) and knock out a .deb file with.

While not having a DEB packaging GUI is one problem, another problem is that Nokia somehow "broke" dpkg due to the current BusyBox implementation "breaking" tar. That's one reason why none of the old themes or themes created with the theme creator program will work on v4 of the firmware (the Skype-enabled firmware).
It's been noted as a bug and one of their engineers has fixed it, but it's not user-upgradable yet.

I would also love some sort of GUI for creating DEB packages, even if it's only for the N770/N800 as I've also ported over a program or two and right now I'm left with using .tgz files installed as root from the root directory.
And reading over the "official" Debian packaging guide makes my eyes bleed.
There is an easier way - done from the command line of course - but again, I think this method is broken due to the current status of tar in the BusyBox build that's present in the v4 firmware update.

In fact dpkg tool didn't work with an error saying option -X is not a valid option for tar ....

But you can use the standart debian method with dpkg-deb --build on an linux or osx (with fink)

Did you every get it packaged up? My wife would love to play it on our 770.

I've succesfully create a package onboard with a two python script modified from bdist_maemo tools package.

At this time i'm making some test and a gui interface. The purpose is to be able to simple create package onboard.

What I find even worse: You cant build a package using Windows!
(or has anybody an idea? I spent HOURS googling...argh)

In fact with my tool you will be capable to build one package on windows (with python and gtk installed). But i don't know if it a good idea. There isn't right management on Windows.

On windows you can use wmware to use the maemo sdk appliance.

I use the following way to make packages of ukmp on OSX. So, this should be easy to implement on linux as well and it should be relatively easy to even make a GUI packager out of this (although I don't have the time to do it at the moment).

Make a install folder Let's call it: UKMPINSTALL.
Create inside of it the directory structure you need as if you would just be extracting a zip to the root directory of your device.
For example, add UKMPINSTALL/usr/bin. (and of course you want to have /usr/share/pixmaps and so on.
Add also a directory DEBIAN in the UKMPINSTALL.
To debian, add the files: changelog, control, copyright, postinst, prerm and rules. The usual debian stuff.
Then you can just call
dpkg -b UKMPINSTALL test.deb

I also have a small setup script that copies my latest versions of file to my install folders and then removes the hidden files created by OSX on each directory.

Also, the comment on not being able to build on windows is really true. On the other hand for theme maker I built the debian packaging from scratch in java so that it would work on windows as well (I actually had windows only at that time). That is also the reason why it's not working on n800 at the moment. I used standard tar library to make the data and control tar files, but for some reason standard tar support was dropped from n800 core libraries (actually from upstream, but that's beside the point).

Ahh.. anyway, I think that it could seriously be possible to make a GUI application for packaging that runs in the device itself. That way it would be accessible for windows users, osx and linux users in exactly the same way. Of course this approach would really only work for python (and ruby and such) app development, but that's probably enough for the small applications anyway. Any thoughts?

Problem solved by Khertan, see the PyPackager thread for an onboard debian package builder. Thank you, Benoît!