I believe the templates in xutils-dev are also responsible for the
libxp6 dependency in kterm, see bug #733483 [1].
Building kterm locally with libxp-dev installed and my patched version
of xutils-dev causes the following lines to disappear from kterm's
generated Makefile:
XPLIBSRC = $(LIBSRC)/Xp
SOXPREV = 6.2
DEPXPLIB =
XPLIB = -lXp
LINTXP = $(LINTLIBDIR)/llib-lXp.ln
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/733483