How to manage/document C dependencies?

[Thomas Koch <thomas@koch.ro>]

Hi,

I'm currently discussing with Jitsi[1] what they could do to make packaging  
feasible. On the java site they'll now probably use Ivy to document and manage 
their java dependencies.

But they also have a lot of dependencies to C libraries. These are currently 
still committed to their SVN as .so files.

I'm totally clueless about C. Is there any best practice for an upstream how 
to document your dependencies, their versions, license and download location 
in a central place, maybe even machine parsable?

And what could upstream do to not rely on the .so files committed to their 
repos? Provide a list of aptitude install *-dev commands required for a 
developer?

[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=627362

Best regards,

Thomas Koch, http://www.koch.ro