Comment 3 for bug 872435

Did you really mean bash in the xdeb command you provide to reproduce the bug?

I tried in a clean oneiric chroot, debootstrap --variant=buildd, with xdeb and cross-toolchain installed and with an additional arch=armel entry added to sources.list, bash failed to build but libcap2 didn't appear in the build sequence:
xdeb --only-explicit -a armel --prefer-apt --apt-source --debug --force-rebuild bash
[...]
Configuration is:
Default configs parsed: ['/etc/xdeb/xdeb.cfg', '/home/lool/xdeb/xdeb.cfg']

architecture: 'armel'
blacklist: set([ 'cracklib-runtime',
        'libdb4.7-java',
        'libdb4.7-java-dev',
        'libdb4.7-java-gcj',
        'libgio-fam',
[...]
Building working tree cache ...
 bash -> ncurses (libncurses5-dev)
Recursing: ncurses -> bash
Build sequence: ncurses* bash*

===== Importing ncurses_5.9-1ubuntu5 =====
[...]
===== Building bash_4.2-0ubuntu4 =====
[...]
test -n "arm-linux-gnueabi-ranlib" && arm-linux-gnueabi-ranlib libmalloc.a
make[3]: Leaving directory `/home/lool/xdeb-bash/bash/build-bash/lib/malloc'
rm -f bash
gcc -L./builtins -L./lib/readline -L./lib/readline -L./lib/glob -L./lib/tilde -L./lib/malloc -L./lib/sh -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions -rdynamic -g -O2 -Wall -o bash shell.o eval.o y.tab.o general.o make_cmd.o print_cmd.o dispose_cmd.o execute_cmd.o variables.o copy_cmd.o error.o expr.o flags.o jobs.o subst.o hashcmd.o hashlib.o mailcheck.o trap.o input.o unwind_prot.o pathexp.o sig.o test.o version.o alias.o array.o arrayfunc.o assoc.o braces.o bracecomp.o bashhist.o bashline.o list.o stringlib.o locale.o findcmd.o redir.o pcomplete.o pcomplib.o syntax.o xmalloc.o -lbuiltins -lglob -lsh -lreadline -lhistory -lcurses -ltilde -lmalloc -ldl
./builtins/libbuiltins.a: could not read symbols: Archive has no index; run ranlib to add one
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status