I demand that Gerald Dachs may or may not have written...
Does anyone use checkinstall instead of "make install" in order to build a xine-lib debian package?
This is not the right way to build a debian package, it is a dirty hack. All the files that are necessary for building a debian package are already there if you check xine-lib-1.2 out using 'hg clone http://hg.debian.org/hg/xine-lib/xine-lib-1.2'.
Or if you grab a snapshot tarball (but not from Debian experimental, since that tarball was built using "make dist"; OTOH, you have the .diff.gz).
With 'debuild -uc -us -rfakeroot' in the xine-lib-1.2 directory, the xline-lib gets compiled and you have debian packages afterwords one directory up.
As well as source packages, which you (probably) don't need or want. I normally just use "debuild binary", but adding in the signing-prevention options is useful for others.
It does depend on whether you're distributing or not, but if you are, I suggest "make dist-gzip", unpack the tarball, copy the Debian directory into it, add a changelog entry (it's worth mentioning the changeset ID) then build.
At least this is the way I build my ubuntu packages for xine-lib with vdpau patches.
You have the right idea. :-)