The purpose of this repository is to have a consistent environment for building packages on any computer. You're going to need Vagrant, Packer, and VirtualBox. If your version of packer is older than 0.5 or so, you can change virtualbox-iso to virtualbox in the respective JSON file (such as debian/debian-jessie64.json) and it'll probably work.
For now the repository only contains an automated installation of Debian Jessie x64. To get started, type make jessie64 in the root of your clone of this repository. Subsequently you can cd debian into the debian subdirectory and type vagrant provision to build the latest package from Git.
You can pass arguments to the virtual machine like this:
BUILD_DEB_ARGS='--email "Full Name <[email protected]>" --suffix "~mybuild"' vagrant provision