Dear Paul: Thank you for your help.
Let me share you a handy thing I learned. You can get the commands that the R packages are built with, along with the source code. Make a directory (this will download a bunch of stuff) apt-get source r-base-core
If I do that, but I obtain r-base-2.10.1 not the last r-2.12.0 files. How can I obtain them? I want to use them to build my own R-patched 2.12.0 version when they arrive. Thank you for your help. I am using the cran.at.r-project.org mirror.
that should download a tarball of original R source code, a diff file that is applied to build R deb, and it will open the code and apply the diff. You can look inside the directory, in a subdirectory "debian", where the configure files that control package building are kept. If you type "dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot" in the directory where all that stuff got opened up (the one "above" the debian subdirectory), it will build the debian packages. It would not be an incredibly difficult thing to replace that R source package with the new one you want to use. But I don't think you need to. Just look in the rules file under debian subdirectory, you will see the configure statement they use. I think in there you'll also find information about what devel packages they assume you have. I find it to be a little difficult to revise debian builds, so I don't really mean you ought to do that. But you could. And I often have!