recompiling expect on Slink

[edrx@inx.com.br (Eduardo Ochs)]

(first question:) What do I need to do to recompile expect from the
sources? I have the following packages installed,

  ii  expect5.24      5.28.1-1
  ii  expect5.24-dev  5.28.1-1
  ii  tk4.2           4.2p2-7
  ii  tk8.0           8.0.4-2
  ii  tk8.0-dev       8.0.4-2
  ii  tcl7.6          7.6p2-7
  ii  tcl8.0          8.0.4-2
  ii  tcl8.0-dev      8.0.4-2

but when I unpack expect_5.28.1-1.dsc and run debian/rules binary the
configure script gives this warning:

  checking for Tcl private headers... found in /usr/include/tcl8.0-int/generic
  checking type of library to build... both shared and unshared
  creating cache .././config.cache
  checking for Tcl configuration... configure: warning: Can't find Tcl configuration definitions
  Dbgconfigure: #: No such file or directory
  cp: ./Dbg504/tcldbgcf.h: No such file or directory

and a bit later it fails when gcc'ing exp_command.c because gcc
encounters a line with "setpgrp(0,0)" (wrong number of arguments!)...
I remember vaguely not being able to recompile expect on hamm also...


Now for the other questions, supposing that the answer to the first
question is not trivial.

  * Shouldn't there be, in cases like this one, some kind of
"README.debian.compiling" in the source package telling users what
special steps they must take?

  * Is there a treasure trove of compilations tricks somewhere?

  * Is there a script to recompile all packages from a distribution? I
know that only the maintainer can PGP-sign a package, but maybe
there's something around that tests if all packages compile OK...

  * How do I make an expectk that uses Tcl7.6 and Tk4.2?

  * What happened to the idea of adding a "Source-Depends" field to
.dscs? Do people really care about that, or is it being forgotten?


Please excuse me if I'm sounding too harsh, and, yes, I do know how
much work does it take to debianize certain packages. But one of my
deepest beliefs is that the most important thing a user (!) must know
(besides reading and writing and running man and info and emacs and
strace) is how to unpack and recompile the source code of a package,
and I don't think that many people here consider this as important as
me. So I've been trying to do my work silently, lurking too much,
posting too little and keeping my radicalism to myself. This posting
is an exception...

  Eduardo Ochs
  edrx@inx.com.br
  http://www.mat.puc-rio.br/~edrx/	(<--perpetual mess).