How do wildcards get set when building eglibc?

Question

I am attempting to build the eglibc-2.11.2 package from source. Stupidly or not, I'm trying to backport it to Debian Lenny, mainly so I can build other things that require it without having to upgrade my whole system past stable. (Whether this is a good idea is an exercise for the reader.) I am using the Debianized source from sid.

When I execute dpkg-buildpackage, the package builds, but I eventually get the following error when it is running dh-shlibdeps.

dh-shlibdeps: warning: can't parse dependency #PACKAGE# (>> 2.11)
dh-shlibdeps: error: invalid dependency got generated: #PACKAGE# (>> 2.11)

(I'm slightly paraphrasing because, unfortunately, the error message has scrolled out of my screen buffer during my troubleshooting session, and this is a long build.)

It is of course quite possible that I have some other package out of date. I updated debhelper from backports, so it is at version 8.0, but that didn't help. What would solve this error?

Answer 1

#PACKAGE# is substituted by dpkg-gensymbols, part of dpkg-dev, as of 1.15.0. Looks like lenny only had 1.14.29.

Backporting dpkg/dpkg-dev to 1.15.0 will probably resolve this particular issue.