Here is a bug report I made to Novell, which was incorrectly resolved
as being invalid:

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=458137

I've been in touch with a package maintainer at Novell, Reinhard Max,
who commented on the bug report. He was initially dismissive of the
problem, because he incorrectly assumed that it only occurred because
Slony-I used the "pg_config --libs" flag, and that I was trying to
build some old version, and that recent Linux versions of Slony-I
weren't actually dependent on any of the object code in libpgport.a
itself.

He wrote that he was previously assured by PostgreSQL core-team member
Peter Eisentraut that it was OK to remove libpgport.a, and that he
wasn't aware of any other package that *really* required libpgport.a .
However, when he subsequently realised that Slony-I was, in fact,
dependent on libpgport.a itself, he wrote:

"Our conclusion is, that it is still unclean of Slony to use functions
from a library that is not part PostgreSQLs public API, but as it is
the default behaviour of PostgreSQL's build system to install that
library, its usage by Slony is at least not illegal, and So I'll
re-add it to the package, at least for the openSUSE build service
future SUSE releases."

Perhaps it would be a good idea to not link libpgport.a (at least on
Linux) in future versions of Slony-I.

Regards,
Peter Geoghegan