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Tweaking Build Options
You usually have to tweak build options when you want to enable an optional feature or behavior that is not activated in the official package, or when you want to customize parameters that are set at build time through a ./configure option or through variables set in the build environment.
In those cases, the changes are usually limited to debian/rules, which drives the steps in the package build process. In the simplest cases, the lines concerning the initial configuration (./configure …) or the actual build ($(MAKE) … or make …) are easy to spot. If these commands are not explicitly called, they are probably a side effect of another explicit command, in which case, please refer to their documentation to learn more about how to change the default behav- ior. With packages using dh, you might need to add an override for the dh_auto_configure or dh_auto_build commands (see their respective manual pages for explanations on how to achieve this).
To make those explanations more concrete, let’s apply them to our sample use case. You decided to modify libfreefare to pass the --enable-debug option to the ./configure script so that you could get a more verbose output from your near field communication (NFC) tools and file a better bug report about your non-recognized Mifare NFC card. Since the package uses dh to drive the build process, you add (or in this case modify) the override_dh_auto_configure target. Here is the corresponding extract of libfreefare’s debian/rules file:
override_dh_auto_configure:
dh_auto_configure -- --without-cutter --disable-silent-rules --enable-debug
override_dh_auto_configure:
dh_auto_configure -- --without-cutter --disable-silent-rules --enable-debug