dh_shlibdeps - calculate shared library dependencies
dh_shlibdeps [debhelper options] [-Lpackage] [-ldirectory] [-Xitem] [-- params]
dh_shlibdeps is a debhelper program that is responsible for calculating shared library dependencies for packages.
This program is merely a wrapper around dpkg-shlibdeps(1) that calls it once for each package listed in the control file, passing it a list of ELF executables and shared libraries it has found.
With recent versions of dpkg-shlibdeps, this option is generally not needed.
Before dpkg-shlibdeps is run, LD_LIBRARY_PATH will have added to it the specified directory (or directories -- separate with colons). With recent versions of dpkg-shlibdeps, this is mostly only useful for packages that build multiple flavors of the same library, or other situations where the library is installed into a directory not on the regular library search path.
With recent versions of dpkg-shlibdeps, this option is generally not needed, unless your package builds multiple flavors of the same library.
It tells dpkg-shlibdeps (via its -S parameter) to look first in the package build directory for the specified package, when searching for libraries, symbol files, and shlibs files.
Suppose that your source package produces libfoo1, libfoo-dev, and libfoo-bin binary packages. libfoo-bin links against libfoo1, and should depend on it. In your rules file, first run dh_makeshlibs, then dh_shlibdeps:
dh_makeshlibs dh_shlibdeps
This will have the effect of generating automatically a shlibs file for libfoo1, and using that file and the libfoo1 library in the debian/libfoo1/usr/lib directory to calculate shared library dependency information.
If a libbar1 package is also produced, that is an alternate build of libfoo, and is installed into /usr/lib/bar/, you can make libfoo-bin depend on libbar1 as follows:
dh_shlibdeps -Llibbar1 -l/usr/lib/bar
debhelper(7), dpkg-shlibdeps(1)
This program is a part of debhelper.
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>