On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 01:59:17PM +0100, Markus Koschany wrote: > and now to something completely different. I have updated Box2D to the > latest upstream version two months ago and it is almost time now for an > upload to unstable. Cool! :-) > Box2D is a 2D physics library and currently we provide a .pc file for > pkg-config although upstream doesn't provide one. In fact they won't > provide support for that and closed a corresponding bug report as > "wontfix". Hmm, that's unfortunate. > http://code.google.com/p/box2d/issues/detail?id=91 > > I tried to reopen this bug report but I got no response. Box2D ships a > cmake file instead and they claim that supporting CMake is sufficient. They seem to misunderstand the purpose of the .pc file; I've also added a comment. > Should we continue to ship a .pc file and diverge from upstream here > or drop pkg-config support to avoid angry bug reports like > > https://bugs.debian.org/715796 > > for the tinyxml package? Avoiding angry bug reports may be good for keeping your sanity, but in general I don't think we should allow such extortion to be our guide. Regardless of the tone, he does have a point, though. If upstream doesn't accept our patch (of course we will send it upstream), then the main purpose of providing the file, platform independence, is lost. On the other hand, that is not the only purpose. The other purpose is that pkgconfig provides a uniform interface for all libraries on the system. That is useful even if other platforms don't do it. For this reason, I'm mildly in favor of providing the file even if upstream doesn't. Strongly if the library requires weird build flags that nobody can remember. Thanks, Bas
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