So I wanted to get Eric4 running on my Ubuntu 13.04 laptop, no problem, the latest Eric4 is compatible, just download the Ubuntu package source, run bzr-merge-upstream and then debuild, right?

No, because Eric4 is a multi-file tar source, where the secondary files (translations) all have binary files that do not play well with the quilt format... burned two hours trying to work around this mess where debian's embedded rules just blow up trying to generate source-code-patches for the binary files and I can't seem to convince them that those are binary files for which it shouldn't produce diffs.  Worse, I don't even see *why* it wants to produce diffs, these are pristine upstream .tar.gz files, there shouldn't be any changes to diff against.

Update: turns out that bzr merge-upstream doesn't unpack the secondary files (the translations), they have to be manually expanded into the correct directories.  With that the package builds properly. Yay.  I stand by the "is not fun" characterization, however.