Hi,

I'm working with a package on an old laptop and am using 'debuild -us -uc' after tweaking the build options. Is there an option to continue the build with debuild?

I noticed that debuild always does some version of a 'make clean' and *always* starts from scratch. Make on its own resumes building automagically. I was wondering if the resume building feature was implemented in debuild.

I looked at the debuild man page and there's no '-us' or '-uc'. What do '-us' and '-uc' do?

You know I went looking for the source of that incantation and I couldn't find it. The reason I started using it years ago was to ignore signing the package. I rebuilt packages so rarely I just didn't bother with keys.

what version of debian are you using, and what is the package you're building?

I've had success building debian packages using the debian/rules file. You find it in the (any) debian source package under the debian directory. It's like a Makefile, and you can edit it (if you feel up to it) and then, from the root of the package's directory tree you type something like...
This builds the deb package and places it in the parent directory. The really crucial thing is that you can set all the variables you want in the 'rules' file.

On the other hand maybe the package you're trying to build can be found on debian-multimedia or backports.

EDIT: sections in this doc talk about downloading source packages using apt-get... see section 7.14 where they even mention the debuild command you used.
http://www.debian.org/doc/FAQ/ch-pkg_basics.en.html
Also I was hasty to say that 'any' debian source directory had a debian/rules file.

if you download the three source files, the foo.tar.bz2, the foo.debian.tar.gz and the foo.dsc and then execute 'dpkg-source -x foo.dsc' you get a directory that has all the source and also the debian directory within it. You probably know this if you're already using debuild.