A giant *THANKS* ! I just downloaded it and will try it out tonight, clouds permitting (or if they don't maybe just do a few in-house snaps to test it). I can generally compile stuff for myself but I lost my disk with my scratchbox enviroment on it a while back and couldn't talk myself into setting it up again just for libgphoto2 (for my own things, I use pyqt, so maemo is just a simple copy away from the desktop version).

PS. As for the .la .a, if I'm not mistaken, you don't actually need those unless you want to compile something on the slug itself (.a-s are usually distributed in -dev packages), so not a great loss if something gets mixed up there.