Picked up on this because I'm starting to look at using more Debian/Ubuntu systems soon so I haven't tried anything yet but jpkg (http://code.google.com/p/jpkg-library/) looks promising and it's written in Java.

Otherwise I'd use something like the Effing Package Manager to read the source dirs and give me a .deb back. But you'd have to have it already on your system (ruby).

Without knowing the old Ant task and its features, you might want to search for Gradle plugins not being included in the official Gradle package. There are some links available on http://wiki.gradle.org/display/GRADLE/Plugins. Including some shameless self-promotion, here is another list with quite promising Debian/Ubuntu packaging plugins:
https://github.com/gesellix/gradle-debian-plugin
https://github.com/jamel/pkg4j
https://github.com/sgo/ubuntu-packager-plugin

As always, it depends on your needs which plugin fits best.

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