Using deb packages after converting with deb2targz - how to?

Question

I've been trying to install "insight", an IDE for assembly language, which is available in the AUR, but there are problems with the AUR package (mainly with the source from Redhat and  my version of gcc, I believe).  So, I thought a DEB package would be easier, and after googling about it, I found that I needed to use deb2targz to convert the DEB for use in Arch.  But I couldn't find any instructions on how to use deb2targz.
I deb2targz'd the deb file in my home directory and then did "tar xzvf insight_6.8.1-0ubuntu0~sevenmachines1_i386".
I thought this would create a subdirectory with a PKGBUILD, but that was newbish wishful thinking.
The tar command created a ~/usr directory with subdirectories: ~/usr/bin, ~/usr/lib, and ~/usr/share.
Should I now try to make a PKGBUILD from these directories somehow? Do I compress them to xz and use that with pacman -U ?  Or am I supposed to simply copy the files/subdirectories to the corresponding directories in the root directory (ie, ~/usr/bin to /usr/bin)?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

Scimmia wrote:
forget deb2targz, it's pretty much useless for things like this.
there are a number of examples on this forum of making PKDBUILDs for deb files, but it's not as fool proof as it sounds. You have to pay attention to what version of each lib the binary is linked against, as well as the actual name of the lib if they rename it. It's almost universally better to build from source if it's available.
A quick look at the mailing list shows that the author suggests building from CVS right now instead of using the release which was in 2009. I'm doing a quick test right now to see how that goes.
Thanks for looking into it.  I was using the *-1a version and the source that commentator "sl0t" suggested in his PKGBUILD - except I had problems with the parentheses and apostrophes on the install= line, so I used that line without paren. and apost's.
# Contributor: Philipp Robbel <[email protected]> (update by sl0t)
pkgname=insight
pkgver=6.8
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="A graphical interface to the GNU debugger"
arch=('i686')
url="http://sourceware.org/insight/"
license=('GPL')
depends=('libx11')
install=('insight.install')
source=(ftp://sourceware.org/pub/insight/releases/$pkgname-6.8-1.tar.bz2 insight.profile)
md5sums=('4ee9824c1e8d6108d886c6c09b24f0ac' '16dddd252c8d64a1f4757626ee895b03')
build() {
cd $startdir/src/$pkgname-6.8-1
./configure --prefix=/opt/insight --mandir=/opt/insight/share/man --infodir=/opt/insight/share/info
make || return 1
make prefix=$startdir/pkg/opt/insight mandir=$startdir/pkg/opt/insight/share/man infodir=$startdir/pkg/opt/insight/share/info install || return 1
rm -rf $startdir/pkg/opt/insight/share/info
# environment variables
mkdir -p $startdir/pkg/etc/profile.d
install -m755 $startdir/${pkgname}.profile $startdir/pkg/etc/profile.d/${pkgname}.sh