On Sat, May 10, 2014 at 9:00 AM, hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > Our philosophy states that our tools "should be a joy to use". If we add > random hackery on stuff that affects portability across distros, then > this doesn't hold true anymore. >
Which one of our tools is at risk of not being a joy to use? All of the tools we're talking about here have no origin in Gentoo. It sounds like the impact is to upstream developers who use Gentoo not realizing that a library they depend on doesn't actually provide a pkg-config file across all distros. How large an issue is this in practice? It sounds like somebody will build something which works fine in their testing, and then somebody will get a compiler error on some other distro and report it, and then they can take 2min to fix their build system once and for all. What solutions do we have? Obviously we should try to get upstream to change, but when they don't I don't see a universal policy that makes sense. We could ban non-upstream pkg-config files entirely, in which case build systems that work for every other distro that supplies them may fail on Gentoo and we need to patch them (and for users building their own software that hardly sounds like a joy to use). Or we could force them to be renamed to gentoo-foo, in which case again build systems that work fine for every other distro that doesn't do this fail on Gentoo. Or we could leave it up to the maintainer, in which case we basically end up with what we have today. I could see guidelines, but even those are going to be hazy. Maybe recommend using a gentoo prefix on the pkg-config file when we're the only distro doing something. However, then we run into the prefix changing on a later release and then reverse dependencies break. We could have a USE flag which blocks installation of non-upstream pkg-config files. Of course, it might not be practical to use since anything which depends on the library in question might force it to not be set so that its own build system can rely on it. Sure, we could patch the build system to not require it, but most likely the build system does require it is that it is common on other distros so we're the ones standing alone. So, while I agree that the current state isn't ideal, I'm not sure that it is any worse than the alternatives. Rich
