Need someone with more familiarity with NetBSD's intricacies to assist on this one. Currently, lintian is throwing a spew of a single error (one per library, in both libc12 and libc12-dbg), based on the fact that NetBSD, unlike Linux, does not have every library dependant on libc (and, in Linux, libc depends on ld-linux, even - which is statically compiled). Checking with ldd and objdump, it appears that the libraries really, truly don't have a NEEDED section pointing to libc, and are, in fact, not linked against it in anything ELF. Is this because NetBSD libraries truly don't depend on libc in any fashion whatsoever (and, as such, I can tell lintian to shut the hell up about it), or because they should be doing -lc and aren't?
what is lintian? what is the error? netbsd libraries probably SHOULD have "NEEDED" sections but they do not currently. this is largely due to history, but there are arguments (i'm not joining this argument tho - i don't care) that doing so breaks static linking. "huh?" you say. the deal is that you _must_ list every required library when linking statically so therefore it follows, to keep development environments sane (ie, the same as possible), one should do this with dynamic binaries. lets pick a random netbsd non-libc library: splode ~> nm /usr/lib/libcurses.so | grep printf U asprintf U fprintf U vfprintf which definately shows that it _is_ dependant on something providing those symbols, which are from normally libc. .mrg.