> I'm looking for an easy way of getting the build dependencies of a > package. At the moment I do look through the build log manually, and > if I oversee something Roman Hodek sends a bug report that the m68k > autobuilder found some missing build dependencies.
:-) But to answer your question: No, unfortunately there is no easy and fool-proof way for determining the correct build dependencies :-( The correct way would be to set up a chroot environment and install only build-essential packages (and known build dependencies) there. Then test build and see what's missing... I admit that this isn't very comfortable. A first hint for dependencies can be the central source dependency list (e.g. http://buildd.debian.org/andrea/i386/source-dependencies-unstable.gz). But some of the -dev packages there might be unnecessary, and the src deps have a somewhat different set of "essential" packages, so e.g. debhelper is always missing there. > Is there a more comfortable way to get the build dependencies of a > package? Or how does the m68k autobuilder find them? It does three things: - It builds in a chroot like above, so that commonly installed packages (e.g. tetex-bin, texinfo, ...) appear as missing if they're not in Build-Depends. - It compares Build-Depends with the central source deps, which shows things like bison, flex, debhelper, ... which are (for efficiency) pre-installed in the chroot even if they're not build-essential. - It makes an access time check on some commonly used binaries for the same reasons as above. Roman
