How to solve dpkg-source source problem when building a package?

Has anyone here had some experience creating a Debian / Ubuntu package? I am trying to backport the lammps package (http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/lammps) from Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal) to Ubuntu 12.04

I only need it unofficially - just need a .deb package for convenience's sake when creating custom virtual machine images for deployment to IaaS platform.

Following the Ubuntu Packaging Guide at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PackagingGuide , I can build successfully, except when I try to rebuild using the debuild command, I usually get this error:

 dpkg-source: error: aborting due to unexpected upstream changes, see
 /tmp/lammps_0~20120615.gite442279-1.diff.aie32n dpkg-source: info: you
 can integrate the local changes with dpkg-source --commit
 dpkg-buildpackage: error: dpkg-source --include-binaries -i -b
 lammps-0~20120615.gite442279 gave error exit status 2

Running 'make clean-all' at the src directory still does not solve the problem. Is there any way to completely clean off all the files that were generated during the build process, or to ask debuild to ignore any differences in the source files?

Solution 1:

Avoid the Debian bureaucracy by just building the binary: dpkg-buildpackage -b

Solution 2:

change the format in debian/source/format from 3.0 (quilt) to 3.0 (native) if you do not want to use quilt. This solved the problem for me anyway.