I need to install geany and geany-plugins 1.37 on a large number (hundreds) of embedded linux computers running Ubuntu 18.04. The official apt repo only provides geany 1.32, which is missing a couple critical features. I'm able to compile and install geany and Geany-plugins 1.37 from source on one machine ... but this is not practical on 300.
Really I want to make a .deb installer package from my compiled sources. This must be possible. I've seen various GitHub issues here (https://github.com/geany/geany/issues/2044) which mention a tool called "checkinstall" that looks troublesome, and another post that mentions a geany Makefile target called "make dist", for which I cannot find any documentation, and have not yet tried.
Surely it must be possible to create .deb packages for geany and Geany-plugins. They clearly exist in the apt universe, but are years out of date. Can somebody point me in the right direction? Better yet, can somebody provide steps which are actually known to work on ubuntu 18.04 for creating .deb packages from compiled geany-and-plugins sources?
Thanks!