Dpkg - doesn't create folder while installing deb package

Question

This is my first attempt to create own package from sources. How I did it:

fakeroot
make install DESTDIR=/home/user/temp
cd /home/user/temp
mkdir DEBIAN
find etc | sed "s/^/\//" > DEBIAN/conffiles

After that I created DEBIAN/control file and run dpkg -b /home/user/temp. After that I have deb package and as a real root I do dpkg -i /home/user/temp.deb. However, dpkg doesn't copy files from deb package to fs but it complains that such folders don't exist ( No such file or directory). As I understand it must create folders as they are in DEBIAN/CONTENTS but it doesn't. What do I miss?

EDIT I tried to add file DEBIAN/dirs with list of paths:

/etc
/etc/selinux/
/etc/selinux/refpolicy
...

But it didn't help ( I tried with leading / and without leading /)

EDIT Command dpkg-deb -c temp.deb has the following output

drwxr-xr-x user/user       0 2016-09-08 10:57 ./
drwxr-xr-x user/user       0 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/
drwxr-xr-x user/user       0 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/
drwxr-xr-x user/user       0 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/
drwxr-xr-x user/user       0 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/
drwxr-xr-x user/user       0 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy/
drwxr-xr-x user/user       0 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy/support/
-rw-r--r-- user/user    6176 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy/support/Makefile.devel
-rw-r--r-- user/user       6 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy/support/undivert.m4
-rw-r--r-- user/user      12 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy/support/divert.m4
-rw-r--r-- user/user   10673 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy/support/pyplate.py
-rw-r--r-- user/user   13796 2016-09-08 10:57 ./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src/policy/support/fc_sort.c
..... etc

And here what I get:

error creating directory `./etc/selinux/refpolicy/src': No such file or directory

Answer 1

The problem seems to be that you have marked directories as conffiles in the DEBIAN/conffiles file. This is not supported and does break. Recent(ish) versions of dpkg-deb will warn in those cases.

Also the DEBIAN/dirs file is of no use here, I guess this is a confusion with the one under the source directory debian/dirs, used by debhelper.