getting dh-make-perl working

[Jens Porup <jens@porup.com>]

G'day,

To improve internal distribution of various projects, I am attempting to
debianize various (internal) web apps written in perl.

After struggling on and off for several days with ExtUtils::MakeMaker, I
stumbled across Module::Build. Is the consensus that this is the way to
go, instead of MakeMaker?

More importantly, I am confused on some very fundamental ideas of
packaging. (This is my first experience trying to make .deb's.)

How can I specify dh-make-perl to just build my rules file, so I can
tweak it, and then complete the build? (I've tried './rules targetname',
but that doesn't seem to work.)

Also looked at dh_make, but this looks like a nightmare, and overkill as
well, for what are generally fairly simple perl web apps.

The debhelper scripts (dh_foo) aren't very helpful at all--how can I get
some error messages out of these things? All I get are completely
useless error messages. I'd turn on DH_VERBOSE if I could, but how? I've
tried exporting it in my environment to no avail, and since there's no
"Pause button" for me to tweak the rules file, how am I supposed to set
the variable before it finishes building the package?

Right now, for instance, I'm getting the following error:

        dh_installdocs README
        dh_installdocs:
        make: *** [binary-indep] Error 1

I have one README file. It contains three paragraphs of text. It's at
the top level of my exported CVS directory tree. What on earth is
going on here?

Any help would be most appreciated.

Jens