Currently, the dependency on libconfig is not completely enforced. We claim it to be necessary in INSTALL and in the packaging configuration files, whereas the check for it at configure-time is conditional. The reason for this is two-fold:
1.) libconfig is not available for all platforms supported by HIPL, and
2.) it is only required by the ESP token protection extension at this point in time.
The current setup allows to build HIPL on platforms that do not support libconfig. Still, we need to unify the dependency checks (and get rid of some additional #ifdefs in the code along the way), once libconfig becomes available on all supported platforms. Alternatively, we need to choose another lib for reading config files that is supported on all platforms already.
Anybody aware of an alternative solution, please, raise your hands.
libconfig is available on Ubuntu since the Karmic release (9.10), in Fedora since Fedora 13, in Debian since Squeeze (6.0), which will be released in early 2011 and in CentOS since release 6, which will also be released in early 2011.
I propose making libconfig a hard dependency once the new Debian and CentOS releases are available.