Hello, I just hit the same snag that the original report is describing, and had to spend some time digging around to figure out what's wrong. Would it really hurt to just add the single missing build-depends line as the OP is proposing?
Alternatively, yes, please backport the 1.17 version into jessie-backports, it's really so much different and more feature-complete than 0.64 which is currently there. Thanks -- With respect, Roman
