packaging on master/va

[Andrew Feinberg <agf@master.debian.org>]

Hello!
	I'm a new maintainer, and I'd like to be able to keep the package I'll be doing on master or va. The problem is, I don't know how I would go about repackaging without breaking the install since the paths would be different if I packaged from my ~dir. Does anyone know how I could do this safely? I only want to change the maintainer field and changelog for now, but I want to keep it like this in the future.
	Also, my package is on multiple platforms. If I'm building a package for i386, how would I build it for the others if I don't have access to those types of boxen? I'm sorry if I should know this or if its a dumb question...I'm just young and ignorant ;)

thanks,

Andrew