> How do I know what steps there are, and what each one is doing when I don't override it? That's what DH_VERBOSE=1 is for. Export that at the beginning on deb

> How do I know what steps there are, and what each one is doing when I don't override it? That's what DH_VERBOSE=1 is for. Export that at the beginning on debian/rules and then do the usual "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc" dance. You will see every dh_* command being executed. If it produced any output, you'll see that too. Most of them are no-ops for small project anyway. For example: the build output will have "dh_configure", which under the hood calls ./configure with the stock debian flags. Your project doesn't use autoconf? Put this in the rules file: override_dh_auto_configure: echo "Skipping configure" Same for dh_test, or any other bit. The funky bit is that if your package needs some special treatment, you can cheat fairly easily. Just hijack a logically suitable no-op step and put the manual tweaks into the override. The verbose output shows you exactly which steps do nothing in your project. :)