Package: devscripts Version: 2.18.1 Severity: wishlist It would be nice if we could pass a "-P profile[,...]" option to mk-build-deps to specify which build profiles should be enabled (I chose -P to match the choice made in dpkg-checkbuilddeps)
Thus "mk-build-deps -P nocheck,nodoc debian/control" would not include packages that are only needed to build the documentation and to run the tests. See man deb-src-control for the syntax of the build profiles. You can see build profiles annotations in python-django for example: Build-Depends: ..., python3-bcrypt <!nocheck>, python3-docutils <!nodoc>, ... It's not yet documented in policy but you can find some information here: https://wiki.debian.org/BuildProfileSpec Note that the perl module Dpkg::Deps (from libdpkg-perl) has support for build profiles. Cheers, Raphaël Hertzog.