PUBLIC MARKS with tags deb & python

The officially recommended way to create .deb packages for the maemo platform is to use dpkg-buildpackage within Scratchbox. For me, Scratchbox is a pain to install for two main reasons. First, there is no RPM package of the scratchbox environment, so apparently I need to run some scripts as root, let my system get a little messier, which I am not willing to do. Second, the docs advise to turn off SELinux in order to get the Scratchbox environment to work, which again I am not keen to do.