On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 08:47:38AM +0100, Neil Williams wrote: > It's also a lot of packages - does such a dependency ever become > inferred by other packages? It probably shouldn't, for your reasons > above, so this would appear to be a case for a lintian check. > If ./configure exists and calls pkg-config or configure.in|ac calls > pkg-config or uses an m4 macro that calls pkg-config, the package should > build-depend on pkg-config ? (We don't seem to have many lintian checks > on Build-Depends.)
Unfortunately that's not that easy since an autoconf-using package may build just fine if pkg-config is missing. pkg-config may only be needed for optional components that may not even be part of Debian. Only the maintainer can tell that pkg-config is required or not. Gabor -- --------------------------------------------------------- MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute Hungarian Academy of Sciences ---------------------------------------------------------