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

[Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 08:47:38AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote:

> It's also a lot of packages - does such a dependency ever become
> inferred by other packages? It probably shouldn't, for your reasons
> above, so this would appear to be a case for a lintian check.
> If ./configure exists and calls pkg-config or configure.in|ac calls
> pkg-config or uses an m4 macro that calls pkg-config, the package should
> build-depend on pkg-config ? (We don't seem to have many lintian checks
> on Build-Depends.)

Unfortunately that's not that easy since an autoconf-using package may
build just fine if pkg-config is missing. pkg-config may only be needed
for optional components that may not even be part of Debian. Only the
maintainer can tell that pkg-config is required or not.

Gabor

-- 
     ---------------------------------------------------------
     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
     ---------------------------------------------------------