Re: Bug#1116323: libllama-dev: pkgconf file in hidden location
On 25 September 2025 at 22:51, Christian Kastner wrote:
| On 2025-09-25 21:47, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
| > 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?
|
| The goal was to ship the llama.cpp *utilities*. In the first version of
| this [1], there was only bin:llama.cpp, with no library or -dev packages
| at all.
Ack. And that makes sense.
| ggml was factored out because it is the most complex part of the package
| (building various backends and so on), and it is also needed by
| whisper.cpp. We didn't want to duplicate the work. And this is still
| experimental; it's still possible that we might need to embed again
| after all.
|
| The library and -dev packages were split out by request because one big
| monolith package with every possible component and test is sub-optimal
| to someone who just needs llama-server, for example. This request seemed
| reasonable.
|
| And it's prep work for the time when the libraries actually become
| stable.
All good.
| > 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.
|
| Lacking stability, you probably couldn't do that anyway, even if every
| distro shared the same installation layout. You'd still have to work out
| how to deal with different versions.
|
| I understand that you have a use case for the libraries, but I don't
| understand the challenge here. Whatever you wanted to do, you
| can still do, just add one more argument to pkg-config or cmake.
Without the pkgconf redirection, how would I know where some other system or
OS keeps the libraries?
| > I guess I could hardcode those paths
|
| Those private paths won't change, if that helps.
Ok, and for now 'deployment on Debian/Ubuntu' is like a requirement for my
(as of yet non-existing) experiment anyway.
| > In reality the library likely moves too fast anyway.
|
| Yes, that is my point. I (or any other deployment) can't give you
| predictability/stability if it's not there to give in the first place.
That's ok. My risk in looking foolish in they eyes of any downstream users/
| Best,
| Christian
|
| PS: I'll be updating llama.cpp and ggml to recent versions over the weekend.
Much appreciated. My dirty secret is that I am currently on Ubuntu 25.04
anyway which doesn't have it yet so this may end up Docker / devcontainer
based anyway.
Again, really appreciate that you packaged this.
Cheers, Dirk
--
dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd@debian.org
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