Richard Yao posted on Wed, 28 Nov 2012 20:26:00 -0500 as excerpted: > On 11/28/2012 05:21 PM, Michał Górny wrote: >> On Wed, 28 Nov 2012 22:49:14 +0100 Justin <j...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> >>> Hi, >>> >>> and another one. >>> >>> Problem: >>> Some packages aren't lucky and their buildsystem doesn't create >>> pkg-config files out of the box. >>> >>> Solution: >>> Create them by hand. >> >> Result: >> packages which fail to build on distributions other than Gentoo because >> their authors were using Gentoo and didn't knew that the pkg-config >> aren't anywhere else. >> >> > I suspect that the .pc files would probably be available if people > installed -dev packages. If not, people can blame the distribution > developers for breaking things.
You missed the point. This has nothing to do with the usual -dev packages on binary distros. If the upstream devs for a package, call it package A, depending on and using a library, call it library B, are on gentoo, and gentoo's creating the *.pc files for library B because its upstream doesn't, then the devs of package A, being on gentoo, won't be aware that the upstream library B doesn't provide the *.pc files, since they're there on a gentoo system, because gentoo's providing them. So the package A developer (on gentoo) will depend on library B's *.pc file, wrongly believing it's provided by upstream, when it's not, thus screwing up things for all the OTHER distros when they try to build package A, because it's trying to use a non-existent *.pc file that library B should have provided, but didn't. The only proper way to fix it, therefore, is to persuade upstream to include the *.pc file, NOT for gentoo to provide what upstream should be shipping, but isn't. -- 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
