building debs from source

make sure to have deb-src entries in your sources.list[.d]

among the installed packages should be at least

build-essential debhelper fakeroot autoconf automake

add more if necessary (like dh-make, quilt and so on)

get the dependencies right:

sudo apt-get build-dep $package

get the sources and build them:

sudo apt-get -b source $package

for manual adjustments, leave out the -b and in the package source dir, do

fakeroot debian/rules binary

after changing whatever you wanted different.