I recently downloaded the source tarball for a GTK application that I'd like to improve. It uses the standard `./configure` and `make` build sequence.

The first time through, `configure` reported a bunch of unmet build dependencies, such as `libgnomeui-2.0`. As I usually do, I had to manually go through and find the Debian `*-dev` package names corresponding to these dependencies... of course the names never match up quite the same, so it gets to be a real hassle.

So what occurred to me is... **are there any helper tools to automatically install the build dependencies listed by the `automake`/`autoconf` configuration files???**

(I already know about the `dpkg-buildpackage` tools, but in this case I am interested in building from a raw distribution-independent source tarball, **not** from the Debian package source.)