Comment 7 for bug 1661805

I just used a bzr packaging only branch and ran 'bzr diff' to produce the diffs I posted.

Grab the tarball of the debian/ directory and extract it.
bzr init
echo -e '[BUILDDEB]\nmerge = True' > .bzr-builddeb/default.conf
bzr add
bzr commit -m "Existing packaging'
Apply the diff

You can then build with 'bzr bd' or you can look around the upstream sources and use quilt with 'bzr bd-do' (and then 'exit' when you're done with 'bzr bd-do'). Either 'bzr bd' or 'bzr bd-do'will automatically download the upstream tarball for you.

In my ~/.bazaar/builddeb.conf, I have this:
[BUILDDEB]
builder = sbuild -d zesty

My workflow is derived from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Bzr

git-buildpackage should also work except that I normally don't normally use a packaging-only workflow there.