It appears that the mainstream development of Amanda has taken off in a
direction that has/will result in making in impossible to compile on many
existing platforms that have been historically supported by Amanda.

While there are good reasons for this change, it represents a major loss of
functionality for us, and I suspect many other long term Amanda users who
depend on being able to use this package to backup their older clients.

I have been discussing this issue at length, off list, with one of the
developers of the project. His recommendation is that we create a "client
only" version of Amanda that is a fork off of the 2.5.2.x branch of th
tree. This version, as I understand it predates the need for glibc, which
as I have just discovered is unsorted on may many hardware/software
architectures. I think it also predates the need for pkg-configure, which
does not seem to have the same portability issues as glib, but is IMHO an
unnecessary build time dependency, given that configure was designed for,
what I believe to be, the same need.

I am thinking about volunteering to lead this effort, as we are in the
middle of upgrading a fairly large Amanda installation at my work, and i
have, at least, 3 OS/hardware pairs thta are not supported by glib.

I would like to hear from other users of Amanda how they feel about this. i
hope the collective wisdom of the list may help to provide some direction
for my thoughts.

Thanks.

-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the roman empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.