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

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@xxxxxx>]

* Goswin von Brederlow 

| I would go one step further. Imho libraries with *.pc files should say
| "the only supported way to use this lib is by using pkg-config".

I would not recommend that, as pkg-config upstream.

| > | Putting pkg-config on Recommends of Suggests of every -dev packages
| > | that has a .pc file, you could as well put it into built-essential
| > | dependency.
| 
| How would a Recommends or Suggests even help? Sure, users would get
| the pkg-config installed. But buildds don't, right? So sources would
| still FTBFS and would have to Build-Depend on pkg-config even if they
| only call some autoconf macro from the *-dev package.

The configure script is usually not regenerated as part of the package
build process, so this would not help at all.  I think this is a
deficiency in the auto* approach.  The autoconf macro comes from when
the upstream source tarball was prepared and whatever the packager had
installed at that time.

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


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