The processes are a legacy of distributed development in the era of dial-up internet. No always-available services, no github, not even any requirement for version control. With every package being maintained independently. While most packages do now use version control, every package has the potential to use a different system, and internally could use a different set of tools to do the actual packaging work.
If you were to design the .deb packaging workflow today, you'd do it very differently. You would probably have a single, or much smaller, set of source repositories, and you would have a single tool to do all the core packaging work.
You only have to look at the BSD Ports, MacPorts, Homebrew, vcpkg, and other software collections to appreciate how extremely complex the Debian approach is, and how the other systems benefit from a strictly standard set of functions to do their job, making all packages uniform and easy to work on.
On the other hand, because of these considerations, Debian has vastly better support for complex versioned dependencies, and the SAT solver in apt is best in its class. The other systems manage the collection as a whole and don't need to care to the same extent.
So I would agree some modernisation wouldn't go amiss. But it's difficult to accomplish that when you have a 25 year legacy of doing it a completely different way. And you have over 20000 packages to fix.
If you were to design the .deb packaging workflow today, you'd do it very differently. You would probably have a single, or much smaller, set of source repositories, and you would have a single tool to do all the core packaging work.
You only have to look at the BSD Ports, MacPorts, Homebrew, vcpkg, and other software collections to appreciate how extremely complex the Debian approach is, and how the other systems benefit from a strictly standard set of functions to do their job, making all packages uniform and easy to work on.
On the other hand, because of these considerations, Debian has vastly better support for complex versioned dependencies, and the SAT solver in apt is best in its class. The other systems manage the collection as a whole and don't need to care to the same extent.
So I would agree some modernisation wouldn't go amiss. But it's difficult to accomplish that when you have a 25 year legacy of doing it a completely different way. And you have over 20000 packages to fix.