On Thursday 17 January 2008 11:31:29 Dietrich Bollmann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to build csound5 on debian sid and installed the debian
> packages `libportmidi0' and `libportmidi-dev'.  But still scons
> complains with
>
>   Checking for C library portmidi... (cached) no

This seems to indicate that the test is not actually being run. You could try 
deleting the scons cache (rm -r .scon*), and then trying again.
Note that there are some already-built debian packages (by me), which you are 
welcome to test, available at http://cs.bath.ac.uk/jpff/Csound5/debian


-- 
Felipe Sateler