As I wrote above, with minimal changes (already tested here in my
system) almost all packages build correctly. The only exceptions are
octave-symbolics, which hangs during the tests (but this is perhaps
not due to the CDBS->dh change, I am investigating this) and
octave-msh, which contains the following line in debian/rules:
# Workaround for #850402. In the testsuite, this prevents gmsh from being run
# in a fakeroot environment (it does not like it).
check-pkg:: LD_PRELOAD=
I do not know how to translate this into my new system.