[Pkg-gnutls-maint] Bug#375815: Dropping indirect dependencies from libgnutls-config --libs

[Andreas Metzler]

Hello,
currently "libgnutls-config --libs"' output looks like this,
-L/usr/lib -lgnutls -L/usr/lib -ltasn1 -lgcrypt -lgpg-error
listing both direct (-lgnutls) and indirect dependencies. - Its output
can be used for static linking.

I am pondering (and have now been asked by bts) on changing this to
only say -lgnutls for Debian, which is enough for dynamic linking. -
Static linking would be broken except for
a) libtool using packages (.la lists the indirect dependencies)
or
b) packages using pkg-config --libs --static to get the indirect
dependencies[1]

This change is probably going to influence most of the autoconf using
packages requiring gnutls, as AM_PATH_LIBGNUTLS is using
libgnutls-config to find gnutls and the needed linker/compiler flags.

I do not expect any resulting breakage (i.e. none or next to none in
Debian packages) besides the one noted above, but perhaps I have
missed something. I'd welcome to hear about your thoughts on this.

thanks, cu andreas

[1] Is this actually done somewhere? Letting libtool doing the
fiddling sounds saner than constructing different compilerflags
depending whether static linking is used.
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