I think it was Debian (but I'm not sure). In the old days there were no "packages" in the modern sense of the word, a package was a program.tar.gz, and always included not only the source but also (if it was or included a library) the headers and everything related to the program.

This was (and still is AFAIK) used consistently by the only sane Linux distribution (Slackware, which unfortunately I don't use anymore).

Debian, Redhat & Co. decided that users should not have to bother with .h files, so from "package1" they split the files into "package1" (only user-executable stuff) and "libpackage1-dev" (others use "-devel" with or without the "lib" prefix).

This seems to break stuff, as the over-complicated ./configure mess should at least manage to report the correct "package", but since the package name is distribution-dependent it, apparently, cannot.

But hey, the less .h files you have on your PC, the more pr0n you can have on it