I don't have svgalib installed. But this poses problems with other packages such as gnuplot and playmidi since they support svgalib and their packages hence depend on svgalib. Of course, I can still install playmidi or gnuplot using --nodeps and it will work (haven't tried with gnuplot), but the dependencies are annoying.
the requirements are there because playmidi & gnuplot ship SVGA front ends... We'll look into splitting the SVGA parts out into separate packages (or just not compiling them....)