[Pan-devel] Unnecessary dependencies generated when building RPMs

[Torstein Sunde]

I have noticed that Pan RPMs with spellchecking always seem to contain
some dependencies to libraries that aren't used by Pan itself, only by
gtkspell and aspell/pspell.  These dependencies are also taken care of
by gtkspell, but gtkspell may be compiled against other versions of
those libraries when the Pan RPM is used on a different computer.

This applies to all the RPMs I've checked, for Mandrake (by John LeMay
and myself) and RedHat.

When compiled on Mandrake 9.0, using the old aspell/pspell, the
libraries are:
  libpspell-modules.so.1
  libpspell.so.4
  libstdc++.so.5

When compiled on Mandrake 9.1RC2, using the new aspell, they are
  libaspell.so.15  
  libstdc++.so.5

On Mandrake 8.2, I get a different libstdc++ dependency
(libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3).

A different gtkspell library, compiled on the specific Mandrake
release, was used in each case.

When installing the 9.0 RPM with --nodeps on 9.1RC2, where I haven't
installed the old libpspell libraries, Pan exits with the message
  "pan: error while loading shared libraries: libpspell.so.4: cannot
   open shared object file: No such file or directory"
But if I create a symlink "libpspell.so.4" to *any* library, e.g.
libogg.so.0, Pan works fine, including spellchecking.  So Pan
isn't actually using the library, even though Pan wants to load it.
I don't need a symlink for libpspell-modules.so.1.

Similarly, the 9.0 RPM works fine on Mandrake 8.2 when I haven't got
libstdc++.so.5.  In this case gtkspell is using a different C++ library,
which of course is present.

So I wonder, is there any way to prevent Pan from insisting on loading
libpspell.so.4 (or libaspell.so.15) and preventing this and the other
unnecessary dependencies?  I've tried commenting out the aspell and
gtkspell-related Requires/Buildrequires in the specfile, to no avail.

Could the problem be some option in Pan's build scripts?  I didn't find
any references to aspell or pspell when grepping the Pan source code. 
Or is this a problem with gtkspell or one the tools used for building
RPMs?

Solving this would make it much easier to use the same RPM on several
versions of a distro, or across distros.