virtual packages, libraries, and dpkg-shlibdeps

[jtc@acorntoolworks.com (J.T. Conklin)]

This question is related to components Dell EMC (my current employer)
are contributing to the Linux Foundation's openswitch project.

Our architecture is made up of platform independent components/packages,
which are adapted to specific hardware platforms (ie. switches) by with
platform specific packages that provide a common API.

Each concrete platform specific package implementation "provides" a
virtual package corresponding to that API.

However, we've found a problem that when the virtual package is listed
as a build dependency, when ${shlibs:Depends} is expanded, it contains
the concrete package name that was used during the build, rather than
the virtual package. This now ties what should be a platform independent
package to specific hardware.

Although we can work around this by avoiding ${shlibs:Depends} and
maintaining the list of dependencies manually, this adds overhead and 
a source of potential errors.

I've tried adading a debian/shlibs file to map the library name to the
virtual package name. I may be just getting the syntax wrong, or perhaps
I'm barking up the wrong tree.

Any advice or pointers would be most welcome,

    --jtc