Re: Should .pc filenames depend on the version number?
Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> writes:
> I am not sure which version numbers you are referring to but the API
> version number should be part of the .pc file name (for example GTK+ has
> gtk+-2.0.pc and gtk+-3.0.pc) but the ABI version number should not
> be. The version number of the library is usually not the same as either
> of the API/ABI version numbers (for example GTK+ is 2.24.21 and 3.8.4 in
> Debian).
One way to think of it is that you should have a version number in the
*.pc file in mostly the same circumstances where you would maintain
multiple versioned -dev packages in the Debian archive, and for the same
reasons. Normally, you'd want to avoid this, since it means a lot more
work and security fixes to both versions of the API and usually isn't
needed or warranted. But sometimes the API changes so much in libraries
that are so widely used that we have to maintain two parallel APIs for a
while.
There are a few places where it may make sense to put a version number on
the *.pc file without supporting multiple versions of the -dev package at
the same time in Debian, generally where there's a radical API change that
will break all current users but the library isn't widely used enough that
it's worth maintaining two versions, but I think those are generally
rarer.
But the default should be to not include it, just like the default for
-dev packages is to not include version numbers in the package name or
support more than one -dev package for a given library at a time.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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