Comment 4 for bug 877673

This doesn't seem to be a problem any more with multiarch cross-building (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CrossBuilding), which has dropped the old-style dpkg-cross-ish PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR handling:

  http://people.canonical.com/~cjwatson/cross/armhf/raring/ncurses_5.9-10ubuntu2_armhf-20121206-2259

Would you object to considering this closed? It's a different build system, but (as the author) I consider xdeb a dead-end experiment at this point; it served its purpose, and its ordering heuristics may still be useful, but multiarch cross-building is a more future-proof approach.