It turns out the *.a static libraries were a autoconf error upstream

diff --git a/debian/libxmltooling-dev.install b/debian/libxmltooling-dev.install
index ecc67bb..fb27edb 100644 (file)
--- a/debian/libxmltooling-dev.install
+++ b/debian/libxmltooling-dev.install
@@ -1,4 +1,3 @@
 debian/tmp/usr/include/*
 debian/tmp/usr/lib/lib*.so
-debian/tmp/usr/lib/lib*.a
 debian/tmp/usr/lib/pkgconfig/*