This really quick and dirty way to create your own Debian or Ubuntu packages can be done by anyone with little previous package creation experience. Even if you've never even compiled an application, I'll show you just how easy it is to download source code, compile the program and bundle everything up in a .deb package you can share with anyone.

It’s quite common that the upstream build system generates/updates some files but does not clean them up properly when you call make clean.

"This morning I prepared and uploaded a Debian package of mylvmbackup, which provides a quick way to create backups of MySQL server's data files using an LVM snapshot..."

"Have you ever had to make a one-line correction (or customization) in a big package? If so how did you manage it? The obvious way is to rebuild a package and serve it locally, but is there some other approach? ..."

When a package is uninstalled, its configuration files are left on the system, in case you’ll want to install it again. Purging a package gets rid of these configuration files.

A next-generation package manager called Nix provides a simple distribution-independent method for deploying a binary or source package on different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. Even better, Nix does not interfere with existing package managers

Ubucompilator is a simply compiler (relased under gpl v3 )to make, configure, install and make .deb package from sources! With ubucompilator you can save a lot of time to compile a softare or create .deb files!

If you have an ubuntu/debian system , you can rebuild the deb file of any installed package. For this install the dpkg-repack package.

The source package format 3.0 (quilt) has a neat feature for this. Instead of unconditionally using debian/patches/series to look up patches, dpkg-source first tries to use debian/patches/vendor.series (where vendor is ubuntu, debian, etc.). Note that dpkg-source does not stack patches from multiple series file, it uses a single series file, the first that exists.