Hi,
This bug can be closed (I don't know how to do that myself, from my
end, sorry).
The problem turned out to be that the GDS package's -dev is, itself,
providing .la files. Those files are the source of the references to
the non-existent libexpat.la file. Presumably the person who built the
GDS package had the expat .la files available when they did so,
somehow.
Anyway, it seems like .la files are an all-or-nothing affair: either
everything has to supply them or nothing can supply them. The presence
of one .la file appears to switch libtool to an .la-file-based mode of
operation, which leads to it failing if it can't find .la files for
everything it needs to ultimately link to. Ugh.
Anyway, sorry for the false alarm.
-Kipp
