I noticed that the compiled mtpaint binary has a lot of needless dependencies. I think this is because of the way the configure script handles LDFLAGS set in /etc/makepkg.conf, so to solve this problem, sed can be used:

# Ensure that -Wl,--as-needed in /etc/makepkg.conf is respected.
sed -i 's:$LIBS $LDFLAGS:$LDFLAGS $LIBS:' configure

This will be useful for all distros, so it may be worth contacting upstream. The alternative is to use the asneeded configure argument, but this doesn't feel right to me as its better to support the system wide LDFLAGS directly as this also has other settings that need to be respected.

I noticed in the development version of mtPaint that the Giflib 5 problems have been fixed, so a quick comment before those sed commands could be handy for future maintainers to understand what is going on without time consuming research:

# Needed for giflib 5 build. Not required for versions after 3.40.

In my earlier report I mentioned about jasper not being a dependency, but it has been left in without a comment. Was this an oversight or is there some deeper thought about this issue required?

I realise its a bit of a political moot point as to which library to support as they both provide the same JPEG2000 facilities. I have no settled view myself, and merely comment to stimulate some thought. Dmitry has made the configure script check for openjpeg first, so I guess thats his preference.