On Sun, Sep 6, 2026 at 12:51 PM Tobias Frost <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd therefore suggest that we first determine why pkgconf is resolving > Requires.private for a normal query, and whether the OpenSlide .pc file is > appropriate for Debian's pkgconf semantics, rather than adding OpenSlide's > entire set of private build dependencies to libopenslide-dev.
This is a longstanding shortcoming of pkg-config. I fully agree that the ecosystem should distinguish between header dependencies and library dependencies needed for static linking, but it doesn't, and a lot of electrons have been spilled trying to get the pkgconf maintainers to support this use case. As things stand, openslide.pc is properly declaring its dependencies for static linking, which necessarily causes the header dependencies to balloon out of control. (OpenSlide doesn't make this decision directly; it delegates to Meson's support for generating .pc files.)
