libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev is an empty package with broken-dependencies

[Max_E]

Procedure to reproduce:
Attempt to install libmono-windowsbase-cli-dev using "sudo apt-get install libmono-windowsbase-cli-dev"

Expected result:
The package will be installed and provide some development headers.

Actual result:
The installation fails with this error:
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev : Depends: libmono-windowsbase3.0-cil (= 1.0-2) but 2.6.7-5ubuntu3 is to be installed

A friend of mine encountered this problem when he was trying to use a .NET app with Mono. He was using Ubuntu 11.04. I tried installing the same package on my 10.10 installation, also from the repositories, and encountered the same problem.

I did some investigation and here are my findings: libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev is being built from the mono-uia source package. The resulting package depends on a version of libmono-windowsbase3.0-cil which doesn't exist (1.0-2, instead of 2.6.7-5ubuntu3 which is what is actually available.) Furthermore, the package doesn't actually contain any files, just a changelog and copyright information.

According to the online package information, these problems exist in Ubuntu Lucid, Maverick, and Natty:
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev
http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/all/libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev/filelist
http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev
http://packages.ubuntu.com/maverick/all/libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev/filelist
http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev
http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/all/libmono-windowsbase-cil-dev/filelist

I have found someone else complaining about this one on the Internet, but he appears to have not found any fixes:
http://old.nabble.com/Mono-dev-demands-older,-specific-version-of-libmono-windowsbase-td31733346.html

It's possible that your packaging scripts are broken and producing bad output. It's also possible that that libmono-windows-base-cil-dev genuinely does not need to contain any files because there are no development headers at all, but in that case why is it in the repositories?

Anyway, thanks for your time.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.