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Re: Should -dev packages providing .pc files depend on pkg-config?



* Simon Richter 

| Hi,
| 
| > Consider there's a package foo which is built against libbar-dev
| > and uses pkg-config to obtain the necessary CFLAGS and LIBS for
| > libbar.
| 
| > Now is it the foo package's or the libbar-dev package's duty to
| > provide the dependency on pkg-config?
| 
| Disagreeing with the others: It is the -dev package's responsibility.
| 
| The foo package's build dependencies are only relevant when building
| the foo package. For someone who develops software based on libbar,
| it is not obvious that foo's build dependencies are required.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you here; I think you are confused.

Whoever develops software based on libbar will have to have a call to
pkg-config somewhere in their build process so they should depend on
pkg-config.  The only edge case I can think of is if libbar provides
some Autoconf macros that wrap pkg-config, libbar-dev should suggest
or recommend pkg-config, but Autoconf macros don't really map to
build-depends/depends, they are more like a development-depends.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are


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