Quoting Michael Koch <konqueror@gmx.de>:
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~mkoch/maven2/ ./ Then do apt-get update apt-get source maven2-binary This downloads the package sources for you and unpacks them. to build the package just do "debuild". This builds the whole package.
Thanks Michael. I finally got around to trying that. Works fine apart from the signing process.
To get more infos about creating debian packages please read http://www.debian.org/devel/. There is a lot of documentation about this. Most Debian Java packages use CDBS. The documentation for CDBS is mostly its source code. ;-)
I will look at all that and try to create a package like that for some other software (probably Squirrel SQL) and probably bug you all with questions ;-)
It will be a while though.. manfred