Building patched/updated versions of applications to replace versions from the repos

[retrovertigo]

There are a few applications (Pidgin and VLC, to name a couple) that Ubuntu doesn't really keep up-to-date in their repositories. What I would like to do is grab the source and compile, then package them as .deb files. I am familiar with how to compile from source and how to create a .deb, but I've noticed that some programs (like VLC, for instance) have a TON of configuration options, and I inevitably find that I've left one out when I compile it, and certain features don't work or are missing.

I've been searching for some documentation on how Ubuntu builds their applications, specifically what options are appended to the configure command, so that I can build applications that integrate with Ubuntu as well as possible. However, I have not yet found anything. Does anyone know how I would go about finding this information?

[geraldm]

Perhaps you might get hints from the files PACKAGE_VERSION-?.diff.gz and *.dsc for the version-build used by the ubuntu/debian package in the repository?
You also need the build dependency packages named.

Gerald