debian-cd has a few dependencies, some obvious and some less so. The packaged version in Debian depends on the key items that must be installed, and recommends lots of others.
This recommendation works, as many of the deps are optional. Exactly which sets of packages will be needed is determined by the architectures you wish to build CDs for. On some architectures, making bootable CDs needs extra support from other packages (e.g. palo for hppa CDs).
The other important dependency for debian-cd cannot be represented
so easily - it needs a copy of parts of the Debian archive to be able
to build CDs. This includes the doc, and tools
directories from the root of the archive.
Be aware that before version 2.1 the commonly-used debmirror
package did not grab those directories when mirroring. An alternative to
debmirror is to use rsync to mirror the archive.
For best performance, the mirror should be on a local disk and the user running debian-cd should have permissions to be able to create hard links on the same filesystem. It should be possible to run without this, using symbolic links instead of hard links, but the code to do this is not as well tested and can be expected to be much slower.
For producing jigdo files, debian-cd uses a
patched version of mkisofs which can natively create
jigdo files. This needs mkisofs version 4:2.01+01a03-4 or newer, or
genisoimage in Debian.