Ok. I am being stupid.
I applied the .debdiff you sent via patch ... < ... redirection. That gets me a modified Makefile.am and two new debian/patches/ files. But then the build command complains about Makefile.am, dpkg-source --commit fails ("reversed patch") so I undo Makefile.am. But then the build directory (I checked inside pbuilder) did not have it. I am overcomplicating this. What should I do? For your debdiff, do I by hand re-generate debian/patches/ ? Dirk -- http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | e...@debian.org