with the dependancy on mingw in gzip, is it not simpler to just edit the control file and build scripts to make it saner? I know what you mean about the ones you built, lots of build time dependencies that are not required on device. eg some just to build the translation,using a python module, based on several others, requiring a library and an executable to build one doc page. Tracking down a sane build order for packages and these is a P.I.T.A