Rebuilding packages for Ubuntu (Debian)

I think almost everyone understands the benefits of package managers over installation with ./configure && make && make install.

Using the example of the recently appeared patch for Pidgin, I want to show how easy it is to rebuild packages in deb-based distributions.

• Training. We will need the following pacts: devscripts build-essential fakeroot.
  sudo apt-get install devscripts build-essential fakeroot
• Download the source. For this, the corresponding repositories must be connected. We need libpurple0, because patch refers to this library. In fact, libpurple, pidgin and pidgin-data have a common source, there we can write as
  apt-get source libpurple0
  so and
  apt-get source pidgin
  Note that apt-get source must be done outside of sudo. Sources are downloaded to the current directory.
• Patches
  wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15741199/pidgin-2.4.2-icq.patch
cd pidgin-2.4.1
patch -p0 < ../pidgin-2.4.2-icq.patch

• Install the dependencies required for assembly:
  sudo apt-get build-dep libpurple0
• We rebuild the package (from the same directory)
  debuild -us -uc
• The resulting package install:
  cd ..
sudo dpkg -i libpurple0_2.4.1-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb
  If you have an i386 distribution, the package will be called libpurple0_2.4.1-1ubuntu2_i386.deb.

After this operation, pidgin (after reboot) starts to connect to ICQ.

PS It's time to switch to Jabber :)

UPD : For ubunt, it seems, there is already a package for ppa . However, my main task was to show how to rebuild the packages.