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.
