I'm still trying to get my head around the correct way to configure a typical source tarball installation to fit into the Debian way of doing things.
The best I've found so far is: ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc \ --sharedstatedir=/var --localstatedir=/var \ --libexecdir=/usr/lib
Does all that look correct?
The general idea is that if I want to try and build a replacement .deb for an existing package, using a more up to date source tarball, then I want all the files to end up in the same places as would have been the case for the original package.
(For all the documentation I've found, the best so far was an answer to a similar question on a dbus mailing list: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dbus/2006-September/005618.html)
For the time being I'm only looking at i386 packages but I think the only thing that would change for 64-bit would be /usr/lib to /usr/lib64?