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

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

* Manoj Srivastava 

| On Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:15:53 +0200, Goswin von Brederlow
| <goswin-v-b@web.de> said:  
| 
| > You are missing the point.
| 
| > What if the library says "You must call /usr/bin/foo during build"?
| 
|         How does the library say that? Why can't I just have
|  gcc -o baz baz.c -lfoo
| 
|         How can the library make that not work?

By not shipping the libraries in /usr/lib:

> pkg-config --libs valgrind
-L/usr/lib/valgrind/amd64-linux -lcoregrind -lvex -lgcc

[...]

| __> pkg-config --cflags --libs libselinux
|  -lselinux  
| 
|         Which is, err, nice. But You can, you know, just use -lselinux
|  in your Makefile. I don't see why libselinux-dev needs to depend on
|  pkg-config. Or even recommend it.

Yes, in the simple case, you can just do this.  In the more complex
case (which upstream might want to cater for), you need to use
pkg-config.  pkg-config allows you to, say, move all the headers from
each package into its own namespace, like how GTK+ and Glib does it
and you can then rename that later if you so wish, without causing
FTBFS-es.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are