[Pkg-grass-general] Is the libmapserver-dev package useless?

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

I've been looking a bit more into the mapserver debian package issue,
and come to realize that the libmapserver-dev package is very hard to
use at the moment.  It is impossible to use the map.h header file
unless compiling with the exact same compile time defines.  The reason
for this is that the layout of the structures used by the map library
depend on these defines, and a program using the library need to have
the same layout as the library itself is using.

The short conclusion is that the libmapserver-dev package is useless
in its current form.

To solve this problem, I suggest making the list of defines available
for use when client programs are compiled, to make sure the structure
layouts end up the same.  Perhaps something like the pkg-config system
from gnome should be used?

An alternative is to drop this package until upstream provide a way to
pass on the compile time options.  But I suspect this will take a
while, and also suspect it will happen faster if we provide a patch
for solving the issue.

Comments?