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

[Gabor Gombas <gombasg@sztaki.hu>]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 06:49:24PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:

>         In this case, again, if my dev package requires a tool not in
>  build depends now, I should declare it, for the same reason -- the next
>  upload of the dev package might have different tools, or eliminate
>  tools -- and putting that build dependency in all the packages that
>  use my dev package is hard -- especially when we consider the cases
>  when the scenarios where these dependencies might change over time.

But it's not the -dev package that uses the tool. It's the user of the
-dev package that uses the tool so it should depend on it. For example,
calls of pkg-config are hard-coded in the user of the -dev package, not
in the -dev package itself.

If a new -dev package requires different tools, then all users of the
-dev package must be updated since they know nothing about the change
and they will happily continue to call the old tool.

Also, if it's the -dev package that depends on the tool and the tool
changes, then the users will get worse error messages. Instead of a
message like:

	Package foo was not found in the pkg-config search path.
	Perhaps you should add the directory containing `foo.pc'

you'll get:

	pkg-config: No such file or directory

OTOH if it's the user of the -dev package that depends on pkg-config,
then you will always get a meaningful error message even if libfoo-dev
stops providing a .pc file.

Gabor

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     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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