Another issue you may have on Debian systems, even when using the correct hdf5 libraries, is that they are installed in a non-standard location which is not found by configure. This will result in the following warning after running configure:
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WARNING: HDF5 library not found. Octave will not be able to save or load HDF5 data files.
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To avoid this you can manually specify the hdf5 locations in the following way: