dh_shlibdeps -l with undocumented absolute forcing

[crcarlin]

It took me forever to sort out why I was getting "dpkg-shlibdeps: warning: cannot find library" for an internal library in my package, even as I was using the -l parameter to point to it.

I eventually realized that by calling dpkg-shlibdeps -l directly it would work fine. dh_shlibdeps wasn't passing along the -l as specified. The workaround was to use -- and then pass -l directly to dpkg-shlibdeps unchanged.

Looking into the code, dh_shlibdeps will prepend a slash to make the path absolute. I also found that this used to be documented, but it's been dropped from the man page.

This came up when I was using pdebuild, so maybe it's something related to the chroot? I really don't know the reason for the absolute forcing in the first place; it seems to work fine without.

Anyway, I'd at least restore the mention of relative paths being made absolute in the man page, or reevaluate the forcing altogether.

debhelper/dh_shlibdeps

Line 192 in 5d1bb29

# Force the path absolute.

[nthykier]

Thanks for the report.

Sadly, I do not have a quick answer to the problem you are facing. I have refiled it as https://bugs.debian.org/1042483 as a reminder to follow up later.