Is it possible to convert a debian source package to a tar ball?

[scott worley <folokai@earthlink.net>]

Hi,

I've been reading the man pages on dpkg & dpkg-deb to find out if it's
possible to covert the deb source directory:

foo-x.y.z.orig
	debian-dir with all the patches
	upstream-source-dir

to a source tar ball with all patches applied?

dpkg & dpkg-deb man pages talk about build rules being applied but the
result is still a deb.  I guess I could manually try to extract the
patches from the files in debian dir but for the package in question
there are quite a few.  Is there a tool to just apply the patches to the
upstream source so I could then tar ball it?

TIA
scott
folokai@earthlink.net