Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Banning modification of pkg-config files

[Rich Freeman]

On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 9:36 AM, hasufell <hasufell@g.o> wrote:
> Longterm, this makes it year after year more difficult to develop
> software for "Linux". Instead (like valve), people start to develop for
> certain distros only (like Ubuntu), because it's just too much work to
> bother with all this hackery-here-hackery-there-incompatible-here
> things. Maybe also a reason they start to bundle all libraries for every
> single game (among the convenience factor), effectively decreasing
> security overall.

I'm with you here, but what is the solution?

If we say we stick to upstream then we don't provide pkg-config files
at all (in these cases).  Then when Debian does the other upstreams
use them and then those packages break on Gentoo.  People are still
going to target their favorite distro no matter what we do.

The only people with the power to break the distro-targeting behavior
are the maintainers of the upstream packages.  The linux kernel
maintains a few stable branches with well-defined support periods, and
as a result you can bet that just about any distro is going to be on
one of them.  Few other projects take this kind of care.  Indeed, some
upstreams can't be bothered to change their SONAME when their ABI
changes.

You could try to get distros to come together, but that tends not to
work either.  The minor distros all have lots of incentive to do this,
but nobody cares about targeting them.  The really big distros don't
have incentive to play along, because they can just tell everybody
that if their software breaks on their distro it is their problem.
Then you have companies like RedHat which want to differentiate
themselves so the last thing they want is to make other distros as
robust, and to be fair they don't want to do the integration work only
to have others mooch.

So, in your mind what would a sane policy look like?  Should packages
like lua not provide pkg-config files even though apparently every
other distro does?  If so, where do we draw the line?  Do we follow
some particular distro like Debian?  Do we list 4 distros and allow
the file if 3/4 use it?  If we don't allow a pkg-config in general can
maintainers still have a "gentoo-foo" file?

If we want a firm policy then there needs to be a proposal for one
that makes sense.  Otherwise the council is 95% likely to just say "we
recommend that maintainers use care when creating pkg-config files but
we leave it to their discretion," because that is the only thing that
makes any sense when you can't come up with a rule that makes sense.

Rich