dh_shlibdeps quirky behaviour

[Francis Irving <francis@flourish.org>]

I'm having a strange problem with dh_shlibdeps which stops my
package building.  This is the first package I've ever tried
making, so I'm roughly following the Debian New Maintaners'
Guide.

Basically, when dh_shlibdeps runs from within dpkg-buildpackage
-rfakeroot it doesn't generate the file debian/substvars.  If
I run it at the command line from the same directory, it
correctly generates the file.

Indeed, if I individually run each step of my debian/rules file
the complete package builds successfully.  It's just when this
is automated with dpkg-buildpackage that dh_shlibdeps stop working.

I'm using the latest dpkg-dev 1.8.3.1 from unstable.

I'm guessing the problem is to do with differing environment
variables, but I'm not sure which could be the culprit.  I can
post any files to the list, or email anyone the complete 
archive for them to try themselves, if willing.

(Extra info:  I'm packaging pygame (see http://pygame.seul.org/) which
depends on Python 2.0, so I'm using unofficial Python 2.0 debs.  Pygame is
also very unstable.  I'm packaging it to get a feel for how to make
packages, and to offer to the upstream maintainer for Debian users to
download from his web site.)

Thanks for any help!

Francis

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