On the pruning of Build-Depends

[Mats Erik Andersson <mats.andersson@gisladisker.se>]

Dear Mentors,

I am about to package a graphical software, and I must properly
design a "Build-Depends" stanza in the control file. My concern
right now is whether I am allowed to prune the enumeration so
hard that the primary dependencies pull in all secondary and
tertiary ones, thus circumventing a natural desire to also
mention build dependencies that exist but are "shadowed".

The particular case that comes to my mind is "libgtk2.0-dev",
which depends on "libpng12-dev" and "pkg-config", which I otherwise
would have mentioned, out of informational purpose, as build
dependencies of the package. Clearly, I would not have mentioned
all secondary dependencies, only those that do directly influence
the package at build time.


Best regards,

Mats Erik Andersson