I am assuming that the original intent of adding linux-image-* as a dependency was to prevent the "Skipping BTF generation for %s due to unavailability of vmlinux" warning from being printed; is that a fair assumption?
I am quite sure that this will not cause problems because of the decision in https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/linux/-/merge_requests/1005 to include vmlinux.h in the headers package. This file is the thing which is generated by "cmd_btf_ko" in the upstream kernel build, so any module or userspace program which depends on BPF will be able to pull the necessary information from that file. As Luca says, adding the image and associated machinery as a dependency to a source file is a very heavy-handed way to solve quite a niche problem (which I don't think even is a problem). It makes assumptions which I don't think hold true in many cases; especially that the system being used to build a kernel or kernel module is the same as the system which will be running it (or even have the same CPU architecture). Any DKMS or other out of tree packages which require the Linux image to be installed should declare that dependency themselves; I am pretty sure that declaring it here is not the right thing. Colm
