How to use/test locally packaged software?

[Christopher Lee <robodoc@mediaone.net>]

I am packaging some mathematical software I wrote during the course of
my thesis research, which I would eventually like to contribute to
Debian.  For the time being, I would like to put the debs into a
directory tree on my local machine which I could then add to my
sources.list to install via apt.

So far I've built one lintian-clean package, put it in

 $HOME/Debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-all/interpreters/simpletextdb_1.29-1_all.deb

and used dpkg-scanpackages to make

 $HOME/Debian/dists/unstable/main/binary-all/Packages

But when I add the line

 'deb file:/home/chrislee/Debian unstable main'

to my sources.list file, the new package does not seem to register
when I run update from dselect.

Is there anything obvious I might be doing incorrectly?  Is there any
software are set of scripts available for automating the proper
procedures for mainlining such a local set of packages?

Thanks
 -Chris