In general, using shared libraries already available on a system is a good thing. Witness the difference compiling against the system CLucene, rather than having to build your own:

real 3m0.256s user 1m39.937s sys 0m29.177s

$ time make # against the imported CLucene

real 6m27.311s user 4m30.465s sys 0m47.084s

Basically, Lucene accounts for half of the entire build time. If you’re lucky enough to have a clucene development package on your platform (on Fedora it’s clucene-core-devel, on Debian it’s libclucene-dev), you can ignore the CLucene we package and use the system one.

At some point, we’ll probably drop CLucene, SQLite and Curl completely – you should be able to build Bongo against system versions of all those libraries. I’m hoping that the build system is now correctly detecting the presence of those libraries – but we do still have some problems on non-pkgconfig using systems. If we can make those systems work, we’ll can get rid.