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