[gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: new eclass - pkgconfig.eclass

[Duncan]

Richard Yao posted on Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:26:00 -0500 as excerpted:

> On 11/28/2012 05:21 PM, Michał Górny wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 22:49:14 +0100 Justin <jlec@g.o> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> and another one.
>>>
>>> Problem:
>>> Some packages aren't lucky and their buildsystem doesn't create
>>> pkg-config files out of the box.
>>>
>>> Solution:
>>> Create them by hand.
>>
>> Result:
>> packages which fail to build on distributions other than Gentoo because
>> their authors were using Gentoo and didn't knew that the pkg-config
>> aren't anywhere else.
>>
>>
> I suspect that the .pc files would probably be available if people
> installed -dev packages. If not, people can blame the distribution
> developers for breaking things.

You missed the point.  This has nothing to do with the usual -dev 
packages on binary distros.

If the upstream devs for a package, call it package A, depending on and 
using a library, call it library B, are on gentoo, and gentoo's creating 
the *.pc files for library B because its upstream doesn't, then the devs 
of package A, being on gentoo, won't be aware that the upstream library B 
doesn't provide the *.pc files, since they're there on a gentoo system, 
because gentoo's providing them.

So the package A developer (on gentoo) will depend on library B's *.pc 
file, wrongly believing it's provided by upstream, when it's not, thus 
screwing up things for all the OTHER distros when they try to build 
package A, because it's trying to use a non-existent *.pc file that 
library B should have provided, but didn't.

The only proper way to fix it, therefore, is to persuade upstream to 
include the *.pc file, NOT for gentoo to provide what upstream should be 
shipping, but isn't.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman