The dante package uses quilt to maintain local changes to the dante distribution. The Debian-specific patches are maintained in the debian/patches/ directory. To apply all the patches, preparing the source for building, use: debian/rules patch To revert the patches, preparing to build a source package, use: debian/rules unpatch You do not need to manually execute these targets when building the package; they are part of the debian/rules target chain. For more information on the quilt integration with Debian packages, as well as editing, adding or removing patches, please see the quilt documentation; in recent versions of the Debian package of quilt, start at the /usr/share/doc/quilt/README.source file.