Today, I had a question about Debian package building from a member of my team which was not familiar with the Debian build system. I thought I might as well turn this into a quick tip to anybody wanting to rebuild an official Debian package with a slight change.

To rebuild the package I’m using a pristine Vagrant environment like the one I described in Debian Squeeze 64 Vagrant Base Box. However, if you do that often you might want to prepare a build box with all the usual Debian development tools already installed in order to save the initial setup steps.

First we need to build a new Vagrant VM:

mkdir builder
cd builder
vagrant init squeeze64
vagrant up
vagrant ssh

From this point on we are in the virtual builder box. First we need to setup a build environment:

export DEBEMAIL="my@emailaddress.com"
export DEBFULLNAME="My Full Name"

sudo aptitude install devscripts

Now, as an example, let us compile the quagga package with SNMP enabled:

apt-get source quagga
sudo aptitude build-dep quagga
cd quagga-0.99.17/
dch --local +custom1 "Activating SNMP"
WANT_SNMP=1 fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc 
sudo dpkg --install ../quagga_0.99.17-2+squeeze2+custom1.deb

That’s it ! Quite simple and straightforward once you know what to do. Have fun customizing your Debian packages.