Hi,
I've just submitted a PR that makes it easy to build rpms and debs locally, out of a freshly checked out syslog-ng tree and/or a release tarball.
If you download a release tarball (one that contains debian packaging files), all you need to build it to Ubuntu or Debian is:
# this one builds the Ubuntu build image locally
$ dbld/rules image-zesty
$ dbld/rules deb-zesty
But rpm-centos7 and deb-jessie also work. Check out the help screen for dbld/rules and the PR.
This should make it pretty trivial to get binaries that you can deploy in production.
This is just a bare-bones stuff, later on support can be added to a lot more distros.
If you want to use it in a freshly cloned copy of syslog-ng, checked out from github, that will not have debian packaging (at least for now), you'll need to merge the "release" branch in order to get them.
# this one gets the debian/rpm packaging locally
$ git clone git@github.com:balabit/syslog-ng.git
$ cd syslog-ng
$ git merge origin/release