On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 12:54:32PM +0200, Gabor Gombas wrote: > On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 12:02:20PM +0200, Bas Wijnen wrote: > > > How is this different with _any_ dependency on the system? Do you > > suggest that iceweasel should drop its libgtk dependency, because users > > might want to use their own compiled version of it? > > iceweasel _uses_ libgtk. A -dev package that ships a .pc file does _not_ > use pkg-config - it just provides a data file that pkg-config (or some > other similar tool) can use. There seems to be a misunderstanding. I was talking about this statement: > > What if the library says "You must call /usr/bin/foo during build"? > > But the library can't say "foo must come from a Debian package". What > if I have my local replacement? Why should I be forced to install a > package that is now useless for me (and installing it would only cause > confusion as there are now two different tools with the same name > present in $PATH)? I was assuming that /usr/bin/foo would be supplied by the -dev package, and that the library documentation mandates its use to anyone who wants to link with the library. If /usr/bin/foo needs a program (such as pkg-config) to do its work, is it the caller's, or the -dev package's responsibility to [Build-]Depend on that program? IMO the -dev package should have a Depends, since the caller doesn't (want to) know how /usr/bin/foo does its magic, so it cannot get it right. Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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