Hi, Here is an idea for improvement. Please check my idea is right or not. I am not familiar with this bootstrapping tricks. (What does <!nocheck> means? If nocheck is defined, skip it for dependency? Following script may need to flip logic ifeq/ifneq)
Recent commits by Mattia Rizzolo made me wonder what is this <!nocheck>. Then the commit message made me wonder why perl library is needed for build script. It was unintuitive but reminded me of my own experience of writing buggy code and its failed test build for uscan.pl. It failed before even running "make test". This is because scripts/Makefile has "all" target from which the following code is run: perl -I ../lib -c $@ This is to catch syntax error but probably cause error if pertinent perl library modules are not available. (Actually, 2 such lines.) In order to skip such dependency to perl library modules during the build, I think, you need to disable these syntax checking lines by changing above mentioned lines to: ifeq (,$(filter nocheck,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS))) perl -I ../lib -c $@ endif Then the following will not cause trouble for missing libgit-wrapper-perl which Mattia reported. $ grep "Git::Wrapper" * grep: devscripts: Is a directory git-deborig.pl:use Git::Wrapper; git-deborig.pl: my $git = Git::Wrapper->new("."); I guess most lib*-perl packages in Build-Depends can be disabled with <!nocheck>, too. Another heavy dependency are: docbook-xsl and xsltproc These should be removed as <!nodoc> if the following lines in scripts/Makefile: %.1: %.dbk xsltproc --nonet -o $@ \ /usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/xsl/nwalsh/manpages/docbook.xsl $< are chenged to the following lines: %.1: %.dbk ifeq (,$(filter nodoc,$(DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS))) xsltproc --nonet -o $@ \ /usr/share/sgml/docbook/stylesheet/xsl/nwalsh/manpages/docbook.xsl $< else echo "Bogus manpage for boot strapping" > $@ endif These should make building this package much easier for boot strapping. Regards, Osamu