debian/ directories in CVS -- useful?

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows brown edu>]

  Hi,

  I'm wondering if it's possible to use the debian/ directories in the
gnome CVS tree to actually generate packages.  I've tried modifying my build
script to run 'dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot' [ my normal procedure for compiling
source packages ] for modules that contain a debian/ directory, and failed
miserably on the very first package (ORBit).  It appears that debconfigure
generates a debian/rules file which performs
'make install prefix=.....' rather than 'make install DESTDIR=....', and
the install of the po files ignores prefix but honors destdir, so it's trying
to install stuff in '//usr/share/local/...':

make install prefix=/home/daniel/gnome/ORBit/debian/tmp/usr exec_prefix=/home/daniel/gnome/ORBit/debian/tmp/usr
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/daniel/gnome/ORBit'
Making install in popt
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/daniel/gnome/ORBit/popt'
Making install in po
make[3]: Entering directory `/home/daniel/gnome/ORBit/popt/po'
for n in ro.mo; do \
    l=`basename $n .mo`; \
    ../mkinstalldirs \
        //usr/share/locale/$l/LC_MESSAGES; \
    /usr/bin/install -c -m 644 $n //usr/share/locale/$l/LC_MESSAGES/popt.mo; \
done
/usr/bin/install: cannot create regular file `//usr/share/locale/ro/LC_MESSAGES/popt.mo': Permission denied

  I also noticed that rcs2log doesn't list any changes to debian/ since
last August.  Are the files out of date, and is it still safe to build packages
from them?  Do I just need to perform additional steps (besides debconfigure) to
get the build to work correctly?

  [ and no, I don't want to install the precompiled Debian packages..,mainly
   because the available versions are all <=1.0.3.. ]

  Daniel

-- 
Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way.  This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
		-- Jeff Raskin