Comment 11 for bug 1616596

These types of tests originate from the uptick of DEP-8 autopkgtests.

Whilst trivial in their nature they have been catching over time:
- miss compilation
- shared libary ABI breaks
- executables segfaulting before they get to showing version/help
- getting unexpected sigbus
- and similar.

Whilst highly unlikely to catch serious bugs, these tests are cheap enough that when they do catch trivial bugs, they usually prevent the OMG the whole distro is on fire. Thus the rewards are well worth the trivial effort / CI cost. Infamous anecdote is upload of libgcc1 in devel series that did not ship libgcc_s.so.1...

A similar test for pkg-config files is that installing -dev package, and linking with a pkg-config generated includes for an empty file with just includes should work. In practice it didn't, as hundreds of -dev packages lacked the right dependencies on other -dev packages.

References:
http://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/statistics

http://packaging.ubuntu.com/html/auto-pkg-test.html