QUICK START: You can either run the cabal-debian executable, or for more power and flexibility you can construct a Atoms value and pass it to the debianize function. The callDebianize function retrieves extra arguments from the CABALDEBIAN environment variable and calls debianize with the build directory set as it would be when the packages is built by dpkg-buildpackage.

To see what your debianization would produce, or how it differs from the debianization already present:

 % cabal-debian --debianize -n

This is equivalent to the library call

 % ghc -e 'Debian.Debianize.callDebianize ["-n"]'

To actually create the debianization and then build the debs,

 % ghc -e 'Debian.Debianize.callDebianize []'
 % sudo dpkg-buildpackage

At this point you may need to modify Cabal.defaultFlags to achieve specific packaging goals. Create a module for this in debian/Debianize.hs:

 import Distribution.Debian (Flags(..), defaultFlags)
 main = debianize (defaultFlags { extraDevDeps = "haskell-hsx-utils" : extraDevDeps defaultFlags})

Then to test it,

 % CABALDEBIAN='["-n"]' runhaskell debian/Debianize.hs

and to run it

 % runhaskell debian/Debianize.hs