Hi! On Sat, 2016-09-17 at 11:26:05 +0200, Michael Biebl wrote: > I wonder if nowadays pkg-config would qualify as Build-Essential.
I don't think so. > We have 2400 source packages listing it as explicit Build-Depends and > countless -dev packages pulling in pkg-config. So the list of packages > requiring pkg-config during build is potentially much longer. As a counter example debhelper is used by almost all packages in Debian, yet it's not build-essential (in part because you always need to specify a versioned dependency, but still), I guess there might be other similar examples. > At which point do we consider a package Build-Essential? > It's not like every package actually uses gcc or make during build either. If you had picked g++ that would have been a better example. :) But make is used by all our sources via debian/rules, and gcc is used also by all our sources via dpkg-architecture (both of which are not strong dependencies by dpkg-dev, and should not be). My question would be instead, why should we keep g++ as build-essential? > Aside from the sheer number of packages requiring pkg-config, adding it > to build-essential would be an endorsement of pkg-config as the one > right tool to detect dependencies during configure. I don't think Essential/build-essential are the right tools for this kind of endorsements. Also, from your later message, I see where you are coming from, but then I also think if the dependencies have accidentally become implicit due to something else pulling them, the correct course of action (even if painful!) is to fix those dependencies. Thanks, Guillem
