Apache compilation warning

[Scott Cantor]

> > This is a minor upstream buglet in one of the packages that Shibboleth
2.0
> > depends on.  libnsl is harmless but pointless on Linux, but required on
> > Solaris.  There's a way of writing the configure probe to not link
against
> > it on Linux as well, if we can figure out the right package (I don't
think
> > it's Shibboleth 2.0 itself, since I don't see any references to nsl in
its
> > source tree; it's probably picking it up from a *.la file via libtool),
> > but it's not horribly important.

It's most likely from a pkgconfig or apxs query for build flags. Something
else on Debian thinks its linked to that.

> Yeah, I got that text from Wikipedia.  I did as you suggested, now we
> don't have to include them in the copyright file. :)
> I hope Scott will come up with positive results on this field.

The best text for a short description is on the web site.

The Shibboleth System is a standards based, open source software package for
web single sign-on across or within organizational boundaries.

If that's too long, it can be edited down.

> > Are the schemas required at build-time?
> 
> Surprisingly, yes.  The configure script checks for them.  They
> probably aren't strictly needed, but why fiddle with that monstrous
> script.  No obvious option jumped at me at first glance.

The locations of the schemas (really the catalog files) are needed at build
time because there are paths to them hardcoded into the binaries to avoid
having to set ugly environment variables or provide location-dependent
commands for 99% of the installations out there.

The paths can be deduced from the location of the xmltooling and opensaml
packages, but it doesn't know the actual locations. A configure only
determines if it can find the headers and libraries, and that could be
satisfied with CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS. If I made the schemas optional, I'd
have to come up with some other mechanism, or just require --with-xmltooling
and --with-saml for any build where the schemas weren't installed.

-- Scott