Debian etch - Rebuilding a package from source.

[Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com>]

I'm not sure how to address the issue of reconfiguring official debs to
enable some option or other that may be of interest to me and not to the
general population and I hope I may be able to get some help on this
list.

I have often run into the case where the official debian package does
not support a configure option that I wish to enable and so far I just
downloaded the tarball & ran configure && make && make install.

Now that I am looking into debian-live in order to create a clone of my
work environment that I can carry around on external media such as DVD
or USB Flash Drive, I find that I pretty much need to generate my own
.deb's in order to include my customized versions into my live CD. 

I read through to some of the Debian New Maintainer's Guide and that has
left me quite a bit overwhelmed. If I took this road, I would probably
need to stop what I'm doing on debian live for an extended period of
time to study debian packaging in depth. 

I did find some shorter documents that provide simplified versions
focusing for instance on rebuilding an existing package such as:

    http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/20/print

The trouble is that this article is not recent and I'm a bit concerned
that its contents may have been deprecated (new tools - e.g.).

What I have done so far is pretty much what is describe in the above:

    . apt-get source ..
    . build-dep ..
    . debuild ..
    . dpkg -i ..

The process appears to work - as tested on gnu/screen - when I'm just
recreating the same deb that I would install via apt-get. 

One problem, though, is that since the build is pretty much automated,
I'm not sure how I could add --xxx configure options that override the
defaults. In particular after reading the man page I wasn't able to find
an option that would let me achieve this.

Hopefully, I don't have to go edit the configure.in file?

Another concern is what kind of naming standard I should/could adopt for
my custom .debs so that they integrate smoothly with the apt packaging
system. In other words.. in a way that will be easy to manage over time
and not interfere with possible future apt-get actions, such as upgrades
to a new release etc. 

I do have a feeling that my questions are probably too general and may
even be the wrong questions. 

If anyone feels I should look at this issue from a different angle, they
are welcome to correct me.

In any event Happy New Year to all.

Thanks!

CJ