• Go to http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/transmission-daemon
• Copy the link to the dsc file from the right hand side
• use dget to fetch the sources

dget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/transmission/transmission_2.52-3+nmu1.dsc

• Update the sources. This uses the debian/watch file to update the sources.

uscan --verbose

Note: Currently the watch file (debian/watch) is limited to bz2, however transmission has moved to the xz extension. Modify the url to use the xz extension to get the latest build.

Note: At this point you probably want to remove the patches in debian/patches/*.patch and update the series file as these patches will probably already exist in the upstream version (and probably no longer apply anyway).

• Build the dsc file so we can use pbuilder

debuild -i -us -uc -S

• Use this command to list the package for each version of debian.

rmadison libevent

• At the moment libevent from backports is a new enough version so we'll just grab those straight into our repo. We need libevent-dev which depends on all of libevent, so we need those packages too.

cd /scratch/pbuilder/repo/
apt-get download libevent-dev=2.0.16-stable-1~bpo60+1
apt-get download libevent-2.0.5=2.0.16-stable-1~bpo60+1
apt-get download libevent-core-2.0-5=2.0.16-stable-1~bpo60+1

• Update the repo.

cd /scratch/pbuilder/repo/
apt-ftparchive packages . > Packages

• Note the package version from the Packages file.

less Packages

• In our case libevent-2.0-5=2.0.16-stable-1~bpo60+1

• First check the available versions.

rmadison transmission

• To make life easier we'll grab the squeeze package and update it rather than backport a sid package.

apt-get source transmission=2.03-2

• Update the sources. This uses the debian/watch file to update the sources.

uscan --verbose

• First we need to update the dependencies. Edit debian/control to reflect the new version of libevent from earlier.

cd transmission-<version>
vim debian/control

• Add a changelog entry for the new upstream version.

dch -e

• Build the dsc file so we can use pbuilder

debuild -i -us -uc -S

• Jump back up a directory and get pbuilder to build the deb.

cd ..
pbuilder-dist wheezy build transmission_<version>.dsc

• You may need to remove patches that have since been upstreamed when you update the code.