Packages known to be needed to build in debian jessie and later.
Some of these will pull in other ones.

    automake
    build-essential  * we now require C++11
    cmake-curses-gui * 3.0 or later
    dssi-dev
    fluid           not needed if compiling headless
    libcairo2-dev   not needed if compiling headless
    libfftw3-dev
    libfltk1.3-dev  not needed if compiling headless
    libglu1-mesa-dev  not needed if compiling headless
    libjack-jackd2-dev
    libmxml-dev
    libncurses5-dev
    libreadline-dev
    libxft-dev
    libxml2-dev
    pkg-config
    xutils-dev
    zlib1g-dev

LV2 plugin adds one more dependency:
    lv2-dev with minimum version >= 1.0.0.

Optional alterative instead of libncurses5-dev
    libncursesw5-dev * only needed for wide (unicode) character recognition. Note the 'w'!

Other distros may have slightly different names or version numbers, and may even have these installed by default. If in doubt try looking for just the main part of the name, but with the -dev extension where appropriate.


Optional alternative to glibc, part of build-essential
    musl
This also requires argp-standalone which is not available from debian and must be built from source.
