<p>I recently downloaded the source tarball for a GTK application that I'd like to improve.  It uses the standard <code>./configure</code> and <code>make</code> build sequence.</p>

<p>The first time through, <code>configure</code> reported a bunch of unmet build dependencies, such as <code>libgnomeui-2.0</code>.  As I usually do, I had to manually go through and find the Debian <code>*-dev</code> package names corresponding to these dependencies... of course the names never match up quite the same, so it gets to be a real hassle.</p>

<p>So what occurred to me is... <strong>are there any helper tools to automatically install the build dependencies listed by the <code>automake</code>/<code>autoconf</code> configuration files???</strong></p>

<p>(I already know about the <code>dpkg-buildpackage</code> tools, but in this case I am interested in building from a raw distribution-independent source tarball, <strong>not</strong> from the Debian package source.)</p>

```
apt-get build-dep <package>
```