Re: dh_gencontrol -a fails for more than one package?

[Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>]

This isn't really a debhelper problem, it's weirdness in how dpkg-shlibdeps
works.

Andreas Tille wrote:
> dpkg-gencontrol: warning: unknown substitution variable ${shlibs:Depends}
>     [I havn't the faintest idea why ${shlibs:Depends} works for the
>      wordnet binary package but not for wordnet-dev?????]

dpkg-shlibdeps is responsible for setting up a debian/substvars file with
values that should be substituted in for ${shlibs:Depends} for various
packages. It does this by looking at binaries and shared libraries in the
package. When you run dh_shlibdeps, this scan is automatically performed.
However, wordnet-dev contains no shared libraries or binaries, so
dh_shlibdeps doesn't run dpkg-shlibdeps on it (it cannot - dpkg-shlibdeps
would just fail with an error). So nothing gets added to debian/substvars
for wordnet-dev.

The short of it is if a package doesn't contain shared libraries of
binaries, a ${shlibs:Depends} line will not work for it. I suppose I could
make debhelper work around this, but it's really an infelicity in how
dpkg-shlibdeps works. To fix, simply remove the ", ${shlibs:Depends}" from
wordnet-dev's Depends: line.

-- 
see shy jo