So a big thank you to all who responded with suggestions and advice. Particularly thanks to Stephan Lachnit and Vincent Bernat for providing fixes and improvements directly to my first attempt.
I've taken most of what they gave (not all - some pieces still in progress) and have a second attempt up - I created as a new repository with (hopefully) a better name and a better implementation https://salsa.debian.org/mpearson/firmware-sof - I've switched to using gbp-buildpackage. It's currently using the v1.6-rc3 tag from the SOF project. My understanding is this will make it much easier to maintain this. - The improvements in all the debian control/format/rules from Stephan and Vincent are integrated - The copyright file has been updated with the Intel and NXP copyrights. Hopefully it is correct now I'm hoping this is a step closer to where it needs to be. I've done some testing and it's looking good. Any mistakes are my own :) I did have to comment out "overlay = True" in the gbp.conf - it gave me an error that I'll have to dig into. Any suggestions/reviews/comments would be appreciated. Thanks Mark