* Hendrik Sattler | Am Samstag 05 April 2008 schrieb Tollef Fog Heen: | > Whoever develops software based on libbar will have to have a call to | > pkg-config somewhere in their build process so they should depend on | > pkg-config. | | _If_ they do. Please consider the possibility that an application | developer links to libbar without using pkg-config. pkg-config is | _not_ part of an API, it is only a tool that _can_ be used, not | must.
That depends on the library you are linking against. I, as an library author is free to say «the only supported way to use my gargleblaster library is through the I_CAN_HAS_GARGELBLASTER autoconf macro» (which then proceeds to set GARGLEBLASTER_CFLAGS and GARGLEBLASTER_LIBS by using pkg-config). If I do that, pkg-config is effectively part of the API. | 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. Build-essential is for something else, and I hope you did not interpret what I said (and which you removed from my quote above) as disagreeing with that. -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
