Comment 29 for bug 831411

pydeb generates more specific dependencies, with version requirements, and also handles setuptools extras (allows to move extra dependencies to suggests/recommends or a metapackage). Where the upstream package has very few dependencies, version requirements are satisfied in old Debian/Ubuntu releases, or there are no extras/only test extra with zope.testing, dh_python2 is enough, so I removed the build-depends on van.pydeb.

The hope is to add the missing features from dh_pydeb to dh_python2 and retire the former.