Re: Transition proposal: pkg-config to pkgconf
Hi,
It seems like the proposal went mostly unnoticed. Any comments, ideas, anything?
Most importantly, I need a green light from the current pkg-config maintainer (Tollef) to proceed with the plan.
Meanwhile, I have uploaded an updated version of the package which dropped the crosswrapper, and instead uses the "personalities" feature to implement its functionality. The package also no longer needs a dpkg hook, as it ships a per-architecture symlinks in arch-specific packages.
On Sun, 24 Jul 2022, at 17:33, Andrej Shadura wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Following a discussion at DebConf, I’d like to officially propose a transition
> from pkg-config to pkgconf in Debian.
>
> pkgconf is a newer, actively maintained implementation of pkg-config that
> supports more aspects of the pkg-config file specification and provides a
> library interface that applications can use to incorporate intelligent
> handling of pkg-config files into themselves (such as build file generators,
> IDEs, and compilers).
>
> pkgconf is compatible with pkg-config when it is run as "pkg-config", so it
> can completely replace the original implementation.
>
> Debian would benefit from switching to pkgconf by utilising a more complete
> implementation of pkg-config that handles aspects of .pc files that pkg-config
> does not. For example, Provides rules and Cflags.private rules are supported,
> and pkgconf has a better (and less costly) dependency resolver for .pc files.
>
> Having a more complete implementation of the pkg-config implementation can
> also help convince upstreams like Postgres and LLVM to switch to using
> pkg-config instead of their custom scripts like llvm-config.
>
> pkgconf also supports a feature called personalities [1], that can be used to
> implement cross-build support without a wrapper script (as currently
> implemented in both pkgconf and pkg-config packages).
>
> pkgconf is already used by other major distributions like Fedora, Gentoo and
> Arch, so by doing the switch we’ll be aligning ourselves with other
> distributions ([2], [3], [4])
>
> Migration plan
> ==============
>
> I believe that it would in the best interests of Debian to only ship one
> pkg-config implementation, so I propose to make pkgconf provide the binary
> package pkg-config without a possibility to fall back to the original
> implementation. This means that after pkgconf takes over the pkg-config
> binary package, all packages depending on pkg-config will be using the pkgconf
> implementation without being able to opt out and use the one from
> freedesktop.org. While this may seem limiting, it reduces the probability of
> some packages staying with the freedesktop.org implementation indefinitely and
> missing out on bug fixes or suffering from other differences in implementation
> details in future when pkgconf becomes even more widespread.
>
> In preparation for this migration, I ran a rebuild of all packages depending
> on pkg-config and found only very few failures [5], which may or may not be
> related to the difference in behaviour between pkg-config and pkgconf. I will
> perform another rebuild and continue investigating them to provide patches
> during the transition period.
>
> [0]: http://pkgconf.org/features.html
> [1]:
> https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/pkgconf/pkgconf-personality.5.en.html
> [2]:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/pkgconf_as_system_pkg-config_implementation
> [3]: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/virtual/pkgconfig/dependencies
> [4]: https://archlinux.org/packages/core/x86_64/pkgconf/
> [5]: http://pkgconf-migration.debian.net/failed.html
>
> --
> Cheers,
> Andrej
--
Cheers,
Andrej
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