Wannabe contributor frustrations

[Márcio Martins via Digitalmars-d]

I decided to try a couple ideas in druntime and followed this 
http://wiki.dlang.org/Starting_as_a_Contributor#Fetch_dmd_from_GitHub

Everything went fast and smooth - I have a custom built dmd 
version.
Bootstrapping and building dmd was suspiciously fast - took 
around 15 secs maybe, if I remember right,


I did my changes to druntime, rebuilt with make -f posix.mak

Compiled a test case with ../dmd/src/dmd test.d, but my changes 
were not reflected.

So, I double check I actually did recompile druntime and look for 
the output lib files, and immediately thought that it must be 
picking up the system include and lib paths instead of this 
development env.

I create a dmd.conf in ../dmd/src right next to my custom dmd 
binary, but still doesn't work.
I try again invoking ../dmd/src/dmd -conf=../dmd/src/dmd.conf but 
still nothing.
I try passing the -I and -L arguments in the command line but 
still it is not using my custom druntime.

At this point I flip the table and give up - what could I be 
doing wrong?

My expectation was that given I followed the official "tutorial" 
closely, everything was going to just work, instead I spent about 
2 hours on this and got nowhere...

dmd should have a verbose mode where it outputs what it's trying 
to do and with which settings, so I could have a chance at seeing 
what I have messed up, and what linker command it is invoking, 
... as it is, I felt totally in the dark, and that just adds to 
the frustration.

I am on Ubuntu 15 and got a system-wide dmd installed from the 
official .deb package.