Packages you should install when creating a build environment for use with pbuilder, sbuild or another tool to create a build system.
- build-essential
build-essential is a meta-package that contains files expected to be on any Debian build system, like make and gcc. Any attempt to build packages will fail unless this is installed.
- ca-certificates
ca-certificates is used by apt and aptitude to download packages from https sources. Build dependencies may cause failures unless this package is installed.
- eatmydata
eatmydata reduces compile times by avoiding calls to fsync(). Most build systems have an "eatmydata" option, which won't work unless this package is installed.
- aptitude
aptitude is an alternative to apt, pbuilder uses aptitude by default to install build-dependencies
- cowdancer
cowdancer is used by cowbuilder to make copy-on-write semantics work. cowbuilder (and by default git-pbuilder) will fail unless this package is installed.
- lintian (not recommended)
lintian checks for common mistakes and policy violations.
![/!\](https://wiki.debian.org/htdocs/debwiki/img/alert.png "/!\")
It's usually better to run this on your main system instead - it pulls in many other packages and could hide missing build-dependencies if installed in a build environment.