These files are here specifically for use in building the evolution-connector package, and should not be used for any other purpose. In order to authenticate to older servers, an LDAP client must perform an ntlm_bind operation instead of a simple or SASL bind. The ntlm_bind is not the same thing as performing SASL authentication using NTLM as the mechanism, which wouldn't require any patching. Newer servers properly support DIGEST-MD5, so this requirement only applies to clients which want to authenticate to older servers, and this requirement will hopefully go away at some point. Because the changes involved both modify the libldap ABI and add non-standardized messages to the protocol, changed libraries are built statically and stashed in a directory where they will not be found by a compiler using the default search paths. The openldap-devel package provides "openldap-evolution-devel" if it includes a patched version of these libraries in such a directory. Packages which depend on these libraries should BuildRequire this virtual provision so that they don't fail to compile or get miscompiled if the libraries are not present. If/when the evolution-connector package stops requiring these changes, the changed libraries will simply disappear. UPDATE (May 09 2013): evolution-connector or evolution-exchange are no longer part of the distribution (as of F18+). However, the patch has to stay in F18 because it is still needed by evolution-data-server. Hopefully, it will be buried along with F18's EOL.