BruceL,

how didyou manage to get over the "configure" dependency problem?

(it depends on debiantools which needs replacing basically taking the entire house of cards with it)
I aim to do as much as possible on the tablet, but am aware its not that practical for everything.

I used to have the entire maemo sandbox on my NIT and chroot into it. If that is too much you might try building under the debian chroot. Lastly, you can probably extract the files from the debianutils using dpkg -x and then copy them into place manually. I've done that with a number of things.

Another problem is that for large builds your /tmp directory will run out of space. I have a script that fixes this.

For software you write yourself, however, all you need is the compiler(s) and make.

BruceL,
thanks for the info, I've managed to get the debian package builder onto my 810 with a bit of foo, but didn't find a straight forward way to get configure working myself.
maybe I will try again at some later date, but first I've got my own code to finish.