[Deborphan-devel] Bug#867509: deborphan lists manually installed package as orphaned

[Brainslug]

Package: deborphan
Version: 1.7.28.8-0.3+b1
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I have manually installed 'libdbus-glib-1-dev' on my buster system
because I need this library to compile other software from git.
The package was manully installed, not as a dependency, and is correctly
not listed as an auto-install:

brainslug at bender:~$ aptitude search libdbus-glib-1-dev
i   libdbus-glib-1-dev


Therefore I do not think that deborphan should list this package as
orphaned, but it does:

brainslug at bender:~$ deborphan
libdbus-glib-1-dev:amd64


My first guess was that this might be because no other package directly
depends on this librarary but this logic does not hold true as I have
tons of other packages installed that that are not a requirement for any
other package either but since they were manually installed and not an
auto-install get properly ignored by deborphan. One example is the
'units' package. It is not identified as orphaned, despite not being a
requirement for any other package:

root at bender:/# aptitude remove units
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  units
  0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
  Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 511 kB will be freed.
  (Reading database ... 221203 files and directories currently installed.)
  Removing units (2.14-1) ...
  Processing triggers for install-info (6.4.0.dfsg.1-1) ...
  Processing triggers for menu (2.1.47+b1) ...
  Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.6.1-2) ...


Do '-dev' libraries get treated differently in deborphan's logic?
And if this is not a bug but some sort of weird "feature", is there a
way to tell deborphan to ignore this particular package?


Thanks!




-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (800, 'testing'), (690, 'unstable'), (680, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.9.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages deborphan depends on:
ii  libc6  2.24-12

Versions of packages deborphan recommends:
ii  apt           1.4.6
ii  dialog        1.3-20160828-2
ii  gettext-base  0.19.8.1-2

deborphan suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information