Reverse build-depends

I've started to build up to actually doing some development-related activities. Maybe. But first, we've got QR Codes dotted around the hacklab and on our namebadges if we're taking part in the keysigning - I persuaded zbarcam (from the zbar-tools package) to reveal their mysterious secrets.

I'm looking into packaging some Java libraries that use maven. Fun. I think I'll be attending some of the talks in the Java track, although I feel like I'm three years late to the party.

While trying to find a good example, I wanted to list all packages which reverse-build-depended on maven-debian-helper. This must be a common task? With some stuff stolen from lamby, I hacked together a shell alias:

rbuilddep() {
    grep-dctrl -sPackage -i -r -F Build-Depends,Build-Depends-Indep "\b$1\b" \
            /var/lib/apt/lists/*_Sources \
        | awk '{ print $2 }' \
        | sort \
        | uniq
}

But this surely can't be the last word on this. For one thing, it might also be useful to recursively find these reverse dependencies. I hope I've missed some obvious way of doing this.

[EDIT (2012-04-13): That would be build-rdeps(1) from the devscripts package.]

I reckon my attention span has got really poor over the last couple of years. More running tomorrow morning. But first, ice cream, I think.