Bug#171542: apt-get build-dep advi (as sarge) does not download ocamltk

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@email.unc.edu>]

Ok. Here is another example of build dependency problems, probably
related.

Try getting the build-dependencies for subversion (currently only in
unstable) on a testing system. It will happily get the version 1.3.14-1 of
swig1.3, but in fact the version required is swig1.3 (>=1.3.16).

Chrestomanci:/etc/apt# apt-get build-dep subversion
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  libdb2-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  apache2-common apache2-dev libapr0 libapr0-dev libdb4.0 libdb4.0-dev
libgdbmg1-dev libneon23 libneon23-dev libpcre3-dev
  libswig1.3 libxml2-dev libxmltok1 libxmltok1-dev python2.2-dev swig1.3
0 packages upgraded, 16 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0  not upgraded.
Need to get 5538kB of archives. After unpacking 23.5MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

and then

faheem /usr/local/src/subversion/subversion-0.16.0>debuild binary
dpkg-checkbuilddeps: Unmet build dependencies: swig1.3 (>=1.3.16)
You do not appear to have all build dependencies properly met.

So basically apt does not handle build dependencies properly. Possibly it
will install any version available and ignore versioning. I don't know the
source code, so can't say.

If I run apt-get build-dep subversion again it does say

Chrestomanci:/etc/apt# apt-get build-dep subversion
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Sorry, swig1.3 is already the newest version.

so it sort of notices that something is wrong, but really it should return
some kind of clear indication that the build-dependencies were not
properly met.

I remember encountering this problem in 2001 when I was working with woody
and compiling packages from source code in unstable, but at the time I was
to lazy to follow it up. Is this a known problem or not? If you agree this
is a problem, could you perhaps investigate it and possibly change the
title of the bug report to something more meaningful? Thanks.

                                                   Faheem.