I'm sure there is something I'm missing here because it seems to me that for pkgme when it starts with a fresh sourcetree the complexity of building a non-native package is relatively low as it "just" needs to build the orig.tar.gz before it writes anything in the debian/ dir and even if it builds the debian dir it could build the orig.tar.gz by simply using tar --exclude=./debian/ (or somesuch, can't remember the exact syntax). I'm happy to work on this if there is agreement and if there is no major gap in my understanding.
I'm sure there is something I'm missing here because it seems to me that for pkgme when it starts with a fresh sourcetree the complexity of building a non-native package is relatively low as it "just" needs to build the orig.tar.gz before it writes anything in the debian/ dir and even if it builds the debian dir it could build the orig.tar.gz by simply using tar --exclude=./debian/ (or somesuch, can't remember the exact syntax). I'm happy to work on this if there is agreement and if there is no major gap in my understanding.