Well, I finally got around to building a debian package from source. I was able to avoid it for a long time by using backports.org. I have built plenty of rpms from source, but that was out of necessity, and I happily circumvented that on the debian boxes I worked on. Since I am a programmer by trade, you may wonder why I am averse to compiling software. I'll put it this way, if I made a living by brewing beer, I would be very capable of finding the right combination of ingredients to brew Bud Light, but that would be pretty stupid. Well, I guess I could try to undercut Anheuser-Busch's prices, and I could name my knockoff beer “Bud Like”. Apparently, software can be free as in beer, but compiling is really not the same as compiling. Go figure.

It was really pretty simple to build a debian package from source, so I actually spent more time sorting through instructions that told me either too little or way too much about the debian package system. Here are the conveniently short directions I used.