I am building a project consisting of the
main binary and a number of .so plugins.
Every .so plugin is linked to a particular
library, and they all export the "generic"
API to the main binary, which dlopen()'s
them.

For example, if the basic linux distro
has 10+ different libs for sound output,
I will have 10 .so plugins for sound output,
providing the same API to the main binary,
so it doesn't matter if 9 of them will fail
to dlopen() because their lib is not installed:
successfully dlopen()'ing just 1 would be enough.
That's why I put ${shlibs:Depends} to 'Recommends:'
rather than to 'Depends:'.

Unfortunately this
puts also the deps for the main binary to
'Recommends:', which is not what I actually want.
Is there any way to split ${shlibs:Depends}
into parts? It would help if I could split
it by the binary name, say,
${shlibs:Depends(main\_binary)}, ${shlibs:Depends(solib1.so)}
etc. But splitting by patterns can work too.

So is there any way of splitting such variables?