When trying new software and compiling with the classic ./configure, make, make install process, I frequently see something like:
error: ____.h: No such file or directory
Sometimes, I get really lucky and apt-get install ____ installs the missing piece and all is well. However, that doesn’t always happen and I end up googling to find the package that contains what I need. And sometimes the package is the wrong version or flavor and is already used by another package that I downloaded.
How do people know which packages contain which .h files or whatever resource the compiler needs? Is there a dependency resolver website or something that people use to decode failed builds to missing packages? Is there a more modern method of automatically downloading and installing transitive dependencies for a build (somewhat like Java’s Maven)?
You can also use “auto-apt ./configure” (on Ubuntu, and probably also on Debian?) and it will attempt to download dependencies automatically.