Re: Bug#1116323: libllama-dev: pkgconf file in hidden location
On 25 September 2025 at 21:18, Christian Kastner wrote:
| Control: severity -1 wishlist
|
| Hi Dirk,
|
| (sorry all for the duplicate mail, I forgot to CC the relevant addresses)
|
| On 2025-09-25 17:58, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > Thank you so so much for packaging llama.cpp and ggml. I look forward to
| > working a bit more with it and seeing about possible R-based
| > frontends. Discussing this with someone else I mentioned pkgconf / pkg-config
| > and tried to check only to see that a) yes of course it ships a .pc file in
| > the -dev package but b) it appears to be in a non-standard location:
|
| > It would be lovely if you could move the .pc files.
|
| keeping these out of the standard search paths was intentional, for the
| same reasons that we don't ship the libraries in standard locations:
| these libraries are not yet stable.
Hm. I do not think that is very clever. It basically just renders the library
much less deployable.
And I am not being argumentative here but why did you bother packaging it
(which from the complexity of the upstream setup is surely non-trivial work)
when at the end of the day you do not want user of the library use it?
I am being serious here. I was planning to work "on top" and now I can't
because I would have to re-invent library discovery on every possible distro
or deployment. Strikes me as suboptimal, so vendoring remains the
default. And I do not like vendoring. Hence the question of "why bother
packaging" ?
| Shipping them in private directories is our way of saying "you can use
| this, but don't be surprised if things break between upgrades".
|
| The Policy only mandates this hygiene for the libraries themselves, but
| it felt wrong to only hide them, only to expose them again through
| standard development tools.
|
| Upstream is working hard on stabilizing though, just last week ggml
| started experimenting with semantic versioning. I intend to help with that.
Oh well. At least now I know. Feel free to close it then. Thanks again for
packaging, even if it is way less useful to me than I anticipated. And thanks
for the prompt reply.
| PS: Note even llama.cpp itself uses ggml by means of these hidden
| directories.
I guess I could hardcode those paths if they were stable across deployments.
In reality the library likely moves too fast anyway.
Cheers, Dirk
--
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org
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