Gregory M. Turner posted on Fri, 31 Aug 2012 16:13:20 -0700 as excerpted: > For the record, I'm not saying we need to put pkgconfig in - I'm totally > agnostic about that, as I am about whether it should be brought in as a > dependency.
[Just replying here as it's handy.] I don't believe the following bit has been explicitly stated yet. I'm not sure if it's sufficiently implicit that it doesn't need stated for not, but in case it helps: The effect of adding pkgconfig to @system is just this: Currently, we have an explicit list of all packages that need it (barring missing dependency bugs, of course). If it gets added to @system, that list immediately gets decimated, and while its historical value can always be dug out of the VCS (as long as the git upgrade or whatever doesn't lose that information, anyway), it's no longer being updated and will quickly go stale, so when the time comes and we DO decide to finally seriously tackle @system removal, that's one more dependency that we have to go to (excuse the shouting) ALL THE WORK OF RECREATING THE DATA WE CURRENTLY HAVE, ALL OVER AGAIN. We have that data for pkgconfig now, and currently, it must be maintained in at least a semi-reasonable state. If we ever DO get serious about @system removal, we'll definitely need that data. So let's not go voluntarily dumping it down the toilet, which is what adding pkgconfig to @system would amount to, only to decide we actually need that data after all, but by then it'll be gone, so we'll have to recreate it from scratch. That's what all this is about, not adding yet another package to the list of packages we don't HAVE proper dependency data for, data that we'll have to create from scratch if we ever do decide to move on the @system removal thing, when for this package at least, we already HAD it, and will have deliberately thrown it away by adding the package to @system. If it was as simple as just adding it to the list, and we weren't throwing away a quite valuable bunch of already accumulated dependency data as a result, sure, no problem, go right ahead. Unfortunately... -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
