Re: Should -dev packages providing .pc files depend on pkg-config?
Le Sunday 06 April 2008 00:08:43 Roger Leigh, vous avez écrit :
> > 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.
>
> As an upstream, I include a .pc file for the convenience of people who
> want to link with my libraries. However, using pkg-config or
> PKG_CHECK_MODULES is entirely optional, and so really a Suggests or
> Recommends is more appropriate. If the user decides to use
> pkg-config, then it's really their responsibility to have pkg-config
> in their Build-Depends, not that of the library packager.
Just to add my two bits to this, we recently had a FTBFS with ocaml-mad
exactly related to this: the library checked by the configure script had
changed its dependency, hence pkg-config was no more available.
Clearly, as others pointed out, it's the .pc user's responsability to
build-dep on pkg-config: we didn't notice the missing build-dep precisely
because it was pulled by the library.
Hence, not only do I advocate for the optional depency, but it is good if
pulling libfoo-dev don't pull pkg-config during an automatic build, so that
you are sure that any ./configure needing pkg-config has it as a build-dep.
Romain
--
Marcus Garvey told us
That freedom is a must.
He told us that the Black Star Liners
Are coming one day for us.
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