Comment 13 for bug 334374

ldap-auth-config does not exist in Debian. It is expected that those who want ldap authentication can write /etc/ldap.conf themselves.

In Ubuntu, I think it makes sense to permit this, so it should be possible to install libnss-ldap and libpam-ldap without ldap-auth-config installed. An example use case is an environment where the sysadmins use puppet to centrally manage /etc/ldap.conf.

Therefore, I don't think that there should be any hard dependency to ldap-auth-config at all. If in Ubuntu you decide to ignore recommendations, I think it's reasonable to expect that you have to configure bits of your system manually, such as by writing /etc/ldap.conf yourself.

If you do want to introduce a hard dependency to ldap-auth-config, keep in mind the use case I fixed in bug 1016592 - please don't regress this.

In a test just now, I successfully installed libnss-ldap in Raring without being forced to install libpam-ldap (though it was recommended). Thus I think the bug originally as reported has been fixed, so I'm marking this bug as Fix Released.

I appreciate that the dependency tree is complicated and it may not be ideal or fit all use cases. I suggest that you use the ubuntu-devel or ubuntu-devel-discuss lists if you want to discuss it further. Perhaps you could start there by presenting the specific use case that is causing you trouble?

A final note: I'm not sure why Ubuntu has such a complex delta against Debian here. It seems to mainly be driven by the existence of ldap-auth-config. What are the implications of either getting this package upstreamed to Debian or dropping it in Ubuntu?