This is a service post 🙂
Today a bug was reported for the package media-sound/gsm. This package’s upstream last released on 1996, so the package itself is quite old.
The problem of the bug is that it does not build and install a shared object, that is bad. I looked at Debian’s patches but the patch there is not complete, as the .so library is built using the same compiled files for the .o, thus making the shared object useless for PIC systems like amd64. Also, over that patch, another patch is needed, for 64-bit clearness.
Now, this package seems dead but it’s still used, or at least it seems so. If somebody wants to use it, need it, or simply is willing to take care of a dead package for the sake of it, an autotooled version is probably simple to prepare, and that would probably work fine out of the box as using libtool makes it compatible basically with everything.
So now, who wants to take care of that? 🙂