There are a million ways to do it, but dpkg-buildpackage has been here for ages and if all you need is rebuilding a package for your personal use and for your c

There are a million ways to do it, but dpkg-buildpackage has been here for ages and if all you need is rebuilding a package for your personal use and for your current system and architecture and don't mind installing builddeps into your system, it's definitely the easiest. The other options are good if you need to ensure the package will build elsewhere, or if you need to cross build for a different architecture (which you might need if you're running a multiarch system and you need to patch a library like Mesa that's still needed by some 32 bit apps), or if you don't want to clog your system with build deps or something like that. Last time I needed to do that, I used cowbuilder, but I'm not really an expert in this area, I'm just a Debian power user, not involved with the project directly.