Sure and in fact it did happen with one of the software i was trying to build, but the (first) error is usually along the lines of "cannot open include file foo

Sure and in fact it did happen with one of the software i was trying to build, but the (first) error is usually along the lines of "cannot open include file foobarlib.h" - so i can search for that library (and many package managers let you search for the header files directly) or "this struct doesn't have that field" (common with -IIRC- libjpeg that at some point made some structs opaque). The latter is a bit more work (fixing the code) but it is also very rare.