This is NOT a 'clean' Debian package. The DH build process with gradle passes "--offline" to Gradle and thus does not work with the libeufin build system. Invoking the libeufin build system directly without the DH-magic results in some failures to create a lock file in /root/ by Gradle. Java builds are a mess. So to still generate a 'nice' Debian package, you must run: $ ./gradlew dist $ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b -uc -us Basically, we take the 'binary' zip file generated by the first command as the "source" for dpkg. Yuckkee!