I am trying to use the geography/gdal-lib package for another package
that requires a shared library version, presumably libgdal.so.  The
current package seems to install only libgdal.a and libgdal.la.
Consequently, other packages that need this library as a shared
library seem to fail.

I am confused about why this might be.  However, from the build log I
see the following when it is building libgdal.a:

     *** Warning: linker path does not have real file for library -lcompat.
     *** I have the capability to make that library automatically link in when
     *** you link to this library.  But I can only do this if you have a
     *** shared version of the library, which you do not appear to have
     *** because I did check the linker path looking for a file starting
     *** with libcompat and none of the candidates passed a file format test
     *** using a regex pattern. Last file checked: /usr/lib//libcompat.a
     *** The inter-library dependencies that have been dropped here will be
     *** automatically added whenever a program is linked with this library
     *** or is declared to -dlopen it.

     *** Since this library must not contain undefined symbols,
     *** because either the platform does not support them or
     *** it was explicitly requested with -no-undefined,
     *** libtool will only create a static version of it.

Could this have anything to do with the problem?  Does anyone have
suggestions on how to make the package install a libgdal.so version?

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,
Brook