[debhelper-devel] Bug#862909: debhelper: dh_shlibdeps does not always call dpkg-shlibdeps

[Guillem Jover]

Package: debhelper
Version: 10.2.5
Severity: normal

Hi!

When a package does not contain any candidates that dh_shlibdeps
considers worth passing to dpkg-shlibdeps, it does not call
dpkg-shlibdeps, even if dh_shlibdeps got called with additional
arguments, which in most cases will contain a list of files to
analyze. This is because $dh{U_PARAMS} or a subset of that is not
part of @filelist.

Say a package with only plugins that dh_shlibdeps does not recognize,
and then doing this manually:

  dh_shlibdeps -- path/to/plugins/foo.plugin

In my particular case the files involved were nodejs bindings, which
are recognized in later debhelper versions, but the principle applies
to any other unsupported files.

This was very surprising and took some debugging to track down,
because it seemed very non-obvious behavior. :)

Thanks,
Guillem