Bug#650601: libpng Package in experimental

[Gianfranco Costamagna <costamagnagianfranco@yahoo.it>]

Hi,


>- The change that libbpng-dev only recommends libpng16-devtools will cause
>some build failures, as several packages needs the devtool to be pulled in but
>do not declare a dependency on this.
>


the rationale for the change is that libpng-dev is Multiarch: same, while
devtools is providing a binary in usr/bin/*

so, I don't think a multiarch package can depend on a non-multiarch one.

that said, if you have a better way to handle this I would really appreciate it.

(that package has a script libpng-config in usr/bin that contains arch-dep information)
e.g.

"libdir="${prefix}/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu""

>I once said that we should check if we could just drop libpng16-devtools'
>dependency on libpng-dev... Did you check if that is feasible? In that case we
>could retain the dependency on libpng-devtools and it would also not be
>necessary to have an libpng-devtools package/provide..


I tried to keep the package with the same dependencies in my refactoring, except
for this issue, because otherwise the package would have break multiarch support.

BTW we have a pkgconfig file, I would like to even patch packages using the 
"libpng-config" script to use pkg-config in a more sane way.

I don't even know why people would have the need to call such scripts.

what is your opinion?

I would be happy to fix packages, if that means having a multiarch libpng.

thanks for the helpful feedback!


g.