today was mainly burned on
https://sourceforge.net/p/osmo-pim/bugs/31/
so that was fun.
also many thanks to niluje for his:
LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath,/mnt/us/extensions/osmo/usr/lib:\
/mnt/us/extensions/aspell/usr/lib:/mnt/us/extensions/gtkspell/usr/lib:\
/mnt/us/extensions/enchant/usr/lib/
-static-libstdc++"
trick - this will doubtless creep into many of my future apps now.
the underlying libarchive was rebuilt on squeeze to the latest version (repos' was too old) with a large raft of underlying cryptographic support thrown in for good measure.
development on squeeze (easiest) and wheezy (-static-libstdc++ trick) now possible.