Re: Should -dev packages providing .pc files depend on pkg-config?
* Goswin von Brederlow
| I would go one step further. Imho libraries with *.pc files should say
| "the only supported way to use this lib is by using pkg-config".
I would not recommend that, as pkg-config upstream.
| > | Putting pkg-config on Recommends of Suggests of every -dev packages
| > | that has a .pc file, you could as well put it into built-essential
| > | dependency.
|
| How would a Recommends or Suggests even help? Sure, users would get
| the pkg-config installed. But buildds don't, right? So sources would
| still FTBFS and would have to Build-Depend on pkg-config even if they
| only call some autoconf macro from the *-dev package.
The configure script is usually not regenerated as part of the package
build process, so this would not help at all. I think this is a
deficiency in the auto* approach. The autoconf macro comes from when
the upstream source tarball was prepared and whatever the packager had
installed at that time.
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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