Re: cleaning up lib*-dev packages?

[Matthias Julius <lists@julius-net.net>]

Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes:

> Then I had the idea that I could just as well convert Sources files to
> create pseudo packages for sources that depend on all the
> Build-Depends. So I create a dummy deb without contents and converted
> the Sources file to have src-foobar as package name for foobar, the
> Build-Depends as Depends and the empty dummy deb as Filename
> entry. After that I could just do
>
> apt-get install src-foobar
>
> and it pulls in all the Build-Depends for foobar. The best thing is
> that, if the Build-Depends of a package change, the next apt-get
> update/dist-upgrade will pull in the new Build-Depends since the
> Sources file gets converted on each fresh donwload and the src-foobar
> package then gets updated.

I think a more elegant solution would be if aptitude had a command to
install build-depends.  It could attach a new flag to a package that
causes aptitude to treat build-depends just like depends of that
package.  This way aptitude would mark build-depends as automatically
installed and remove them if they are not needed anymore.

Matthias