The difficulty of figuring out exactly what you need to do is part of the problem. It's hard to shake the feeling that you don't really grok the build system.

The difficulty of figuring out exactly what you need to do is part of the problem. It's hard to shake the feeling that you don't really grok the build system. But in any case it's never been as easy as just running that one command for me. Actual example from my bash history: $ apt source packagename $ vim path/to/broken/file.c $ dpkg-buildpackage Now I get an error: "aborting due to unexpected upstream changes". $ dpkg-source --commit Make a changelog entry for the changes you made $ dpkg-buildpackage This fails with an inscrutable error "dpkg-buildpackage: error: failed to sign .dsc file" If you know what you're doing you realize that you can just ignore this error, it doesn't affect the built package. If you don't, you have to search around and then build it again with $ dpkg-buildpackage -uc So it's not, like, the worst thing in the world but it doesn't go out of its way to be intuitive either. It's hard to find good help on what to do (the man pages are arguably too detailed to be useful to people who just want to make small changes), and hopefully you didn't follow a rabbit trail with debuild.