Is dh-make the standard way to build debian packages?

Solution 1:

You can create Debian packages in several ways. dh- tools are helperscripts to aid you in creating the correct directory structure and files. dh-make is the most basic one, yet has a lot of heuristic and works well with software using the GNU autotools (the ./configure, make, make install ones). It will do a lot of work for you.

Then you can use debuild to create a source and binary package.

"Your way" is just building from binary files. This is unwanted, as you can't build for other distributions (releases) or architectures. Also, Debian/Ubuntu requires to have a source package in order to be included in the repositories (along a lot of other requirements and guidelines). See for more information the links @saji89 povided. I also suggest you to download packages and inspect how they're put together, using apt-get source packagename.

Update

You mentioned later in a comment you're packaging a Java application. The Debian wiki on Java packaging mentions this:

Use of javahelper is not actually required, however implementing the required policy elements without javahelper is quite difficult, so it is assumed that you will be using javahelper.

So, I suggest to start reading about how to package using javahelper and DH, or the alternative to DH: CDBS.

Solution 2:

This is the official Ubuntu packaging guide:
http://packaging.ubuntu.com/html/index.html

The information you want will be at: http://packaging.ubuntu.com/html/packaging-new-software.html