Comment 13 for bug 96700

After looking deeply into problem...

1. libneon.la was removed according to Debian policy
2. Debian policy will not be changed in near future
3. Subversion ( for example ) do not want to make their configure scripts OS-dependent

This confrontation lasts for years, and after I've read enough posts about it - I don't think that there will be done anything about it...

IMHO, the best solution will be to make neon-dependent configuration script ( i.e. subversion's autoconf ) OS dependent ( or at least pkg-config dependent ), but they don't want to...

Somebody should make first step here. It's not a good looking situation when debian-based OSes are not compatible with subversion development.

Printing location of .so file if .la file is absent is not quite right, but if we take that --la-file option is called to determine library against which link should be made, then .so answer is ok, imho. Probably with some warning, visible to user, to let them know what was done.

In other words, something like attachment.

It is not a good looking solution, nor a 'good style' solution, it's just a workaround, but I think it's better then 'Subversion sources are incompatible with Debian-based OSes without hand-work'..