tree and turns it into a source package that can be uploaded.  What I'm
looking for is
something that can take a non-Debianized source tree and turn it into a
native package,
essentially by pre-filling a debian/ directory like dh_make does, but
including additional
metadata available in the setup.py.
> 
> I've started taking a crack at this:

Barry, what do you mean with “native package”? In Debian parlance, a
native package is a piece of software that isn’t released outside of
Debian and thus has no hyphen in the version number (a hyphen is
normally used to separate the upstream version number from a
debian-packaging-specific number, e.g. “0.2-1”). I don’t know stdeb (I
avoid Setuptools), so I don’t understand the difference you make.

On a related note, I’ve seen in your setupdebian code that you
unconditionally remove some files under the debian directory, but some
of them may be useful, especially for building multiple binary packages
(i.e. separate installable .deb packages) out of one source package,
e.g. to split architecture-independent modules from arch-dependent C
extensions (like mercurial and mercurial-common). More info:
- how to build multiple binary packages: http://wiki.debian.org/PkgSplit
http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2009/09/msg00091.html
- questioning usefulness of PEP 345 for automation of deb packaging:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2009/11/msg00076.html
- extensions to Distutils that may meet some debian packaging needs:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~python-distutils-extra-hackers/python-distutils-extra/debian/files
- rough proposal by myself for support in Distutils2:
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Distutils/Proposals/SplitAndCompoundDistributions

HTH