reassign 222652 dpkg-dev thanks and hope that's ok.. Well, of Branden's options, 1 seems like going behind dpkg-gencontrol's back and the wrong place to put code to remove dups; 2 complicates debhelper unnessarily; 3 seems like a good idea to me, but I dunno how the dpkg developers will feel about it; 4 seems reasonable too.
While debhelper might be the highest profile example of this, this is a problem that any tool that generates dependencies during the build process can run into. So fixing it in dpkg (or declaring it a non-problem) seems much better to me than fixing it in debhelper. The clincher for me is that dpkg-shlibdeps *already* works around this same problem to an extent: If multiple shlibs files generate duplicate dependencies on the same versions of a shared library, only one is output into the substvars. dpkg-shlibdeps does not go all the way and check for redundant but non-identical dependencies. Rather than implementing this stuff more than once to varying degrees, it seems better to go up a level and implement it there. Or to ignore it of course. :-) -- see shy jo
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