Ever noticed how the dependency fields of development library packages are tedious to maintain? They are often:

• out of sync with the build dependencies,
• outdated regarding the actual requirements of pkg-config files,
• and of course incorrect whenever libtool decides to add tons of unneeded dependencies.

In order to improve the situation a bit, I have written a debhelper script to handle development libraries and generate automatically these dependencies in a ${dev:Depends} variable, using the pkg-config information. I have requested its inclusion in debhelper, but in the meantime, I’d appreciate if people could test it against various library packages so that its potential bugs can be fixed; this could surely convince Joey to accept it faster.

Here you go: dh_devlibs.

The next step in this direction is to do some automatic validation of build-dependencies. The first approach I thought of requires some improvements in pkg-config, but given how this package is maintained, I’m afraid it will require some time. There are other possibilities involving diversions, so it is still possible that something good comes out of this.