Thank you so much for your answers.
It happens that I tried to override dh_$stuff instead of dh_auto_$stuff, now i've got the desired result (debuild runs phing) and i've also learnt about how debuild works and the override dynamics by the maintainer's guide.
Geert:
Show the code, the files, for which you want help.
Or rewrite the request in:
Hi, I want to package with ping, who shares a working example?
At least stop with leaving out the interresting details.
That might be hard. ( Yes, I know, asking the right question
is half the answer ) But put some effort in it.
I didn't mean to ask for a working example (as i believe there aren't many), i was just aiming for some direction on where to look or what to read, that is, i've made a simple question because i believe i could make it work myself with a simple answer (or some directions), which i received quickly and direct to the point.
I don't mean to be rude, i think sending more info on this case would just make whoever wanted to help spend more time trying to figure it out what's wrong when i could just read some manual/docs pointed by someone, Colin and David's response allowed me to look for the right places.
But since we've got here, I'm trying to change the vufind[1] current packaging scheme to make it debian-ready in case anybody wants to ship it on the repositories, I've already did some work to support php7 and mariadb (as i know this should be the stretch defaults) and changed the copyright to DEP-5.
Right now there's a little problem on making the package buildable with debuild, they're using a phing target to make it, calling dpkg-deb -b under the hood.
They don't have neither build or clean targets on build.xml and i wanna keep the rules changes as minimum as possible, so i will study some modifications on their build.xml file which lets the previous build system (they use $phing package) and debuild work together.
Maybe it will be possible to ship vufind with Stretch.