Debian: apu-config and BDB

[Ben Reser <ben@reser.org>]

Since the change that was made in reaction to this bug report:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=622081

apu-config on Debian has avoided returning the BDB library from
--libs.  The bug suggests that BDB is related to the DBM support in
APR Util.  This is actually not the case.  They are two separate
database interfaces supported by APR Util as can be seen by the two
separate API pages for them:
http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr-util/1.4/group___a_p_r___util___d_b_d.html
vs
http://apr.apache.org/docs/apr-util/1.4/group___a_p_r___util___d_b_m.html

The bug also says that it thinks this dependency is useless. It may be
useless for some projects that aren't using the bdb features of the
library. Those that are using the bdb features will have problems with
their build system as a result of this change.

For example.  Subversion would not detect BDB on Debian based systems
due to this change (until I made a change to our build system to work
around this).

Ultimately there are two failures here.

1) You shouldn't be changing apu-config's output in order to remove
dependencies that are useless for a particular project.  Rather you
should patch that's project's use of apu-config to filter those things
out.

2) Passing --dbm-libs to get BDB libraries is wrong.

I'd strongly advise that this change be reverted and that the packages
that end up with BDB dependencies that are undesirable be fixed.
Alternatively, you could add --avoid-bdb and --bdb-libs flags to
apu-config.  I'd suspect that something like that would be accepted
upstream by APR-UTIL.

I'd urge the Debian project not to unilaterally take it upon itself to
change the default behavior of a configuration tool like this.