E I'm finding that I'd like to be able to build my own versions of system packages and to rebuild a chroot myself in order to debug things. I also believe I want a mechanism for maintaining diffs to the Debian sources that are not clean enough to apply upstream yet. For example we don't have tetex yet. Getting te]tex probably depends on X11 and a bunch of stuff I'd rather not mess with. However I'd like bison and some other fairly simple packages. In order to get these I'd like to be able to convince texi2dvi to either fail gracefully or to convince tetex to build without X11. Either of these involves patching a Debian package. In particular it involves patching the package in a way that would probably not be accepted by the Debian maintainer.
Yet I want to be able to maintain these patches, share them with others and have others be able to add patches. I'd be willing to throw together a build system to do this sort of thing. Would it be useful to anyone besides me? Would it be useful enough for people to give me the current hacked together sources so that I can integrate them into such a system? --Sam
