Le Sunday 06 April 2008 00:08:43 Roger Leigh, vous avez écrit : > > The foo package's build dependencies are only relevant when building the > > foo package. For someone who develops software based on libbar, it is > > not obvious that foo's build dependencies are required. > > As an upstream, I include a .pc file for the convenience of people who > want to link with my libraries. However, using pkg-config or > PKG_CHECK_MODULES is entirely optional, and so really a Suggests or > Recommends is more appropriate. If the user decides to use > pkg-config, then it's really their responsibility to have pkg-config > in their Build-Depends, not that of the library packager.
Just to add my two bits to this, we recently had a FTBFS with ocaml-mad exactly related to this: the library checked by the configure script had changed its dependency, hence pkg-config was no more available. Clearly, as others pointed out, it's the .pc user's responsability to build-dep on pkg-config: we didn't notice the missing build-dep precisely because it was pulled by the library. Hence, not only do I advocate for the optional depency, but it is good if pulling libfoo-dev don't pull pkg-config during an automatic build, so that you are sure that any ./configure needing pkg-config has it as a build-dep. Romain -- Marcus Garvey told us That freedom is a must. He told us that the Black Star Liners Are coming one day for us.
