Hello all,
For example, when installing package libA, can I tell my system to automatically install the corresponding dev package (usually libA-dev, if any).

Thanks.

You could create a wrapper script that takes package names as arguments and then does something like:

for i in $@; do
apt-get install $i ${i}-devel
done

Why bother? APT will pull them in if they are needed. You could always set aptitude to install recommended and suggested packages, but then you get a lot of crap you really don't need.

I thought about something like that but there some issues, some packages don't conform. eg libtheora0 & libtheora-dev. Quite a few packages do not have seperate -dev packages and apt-get halts at non-existant packages. I was hoping there was a nice easy way builtin somewhere but it is now obvious there isn't: after looking around I noticed that most packages do not mention their corresponding -dev packages in the package relations, so any form of apt-related automatic method is off the table, so I guess it's back to manual search and install for now.

Mainly because I like to compile things alot and need all the headers installed for this. Like the other day I needed to compile a kde app. I had to grab dev packages for X, kdelibs, qt and quite a few others... I figured it would be nice just to have them installed already , just like I do on my LFS box.

Anyway thanks for replying.

what about build-dep?

#apt-get build-dep package

as I understand it, that should download all the packages required to build package. I guess this only works if the software you're compiling is already in the APT repos with listed build-dependencies.