Making .deb's

[Steven Pasternak]

Hi! I have been using Ubuntu for a few months now, and it is great. I 
came from most of the big RPM distros (Fedora/Redhat,SuSE,Mandrake), and 
used rpm to compile and install stuff. I finally figured out how to get 
checkinstall to build .debs, but I can't figure out how to get the 
debian equivalent of a Source RPM, with the ./configure options. I do 
know how to use apt-get build-dep, etc., just not how the source is 
configured in the deb's already downloaded. If anyone knows how to find 
it, your help would be greatly appreciated.
-Steven