Hi,
On Wed, 4 Feb 2026 22:21:43 +0200 Faidon Liambotis <[email protected]>
wrote:
Given this used to work, I bisected pkgconf in order to find where and
why this change was introduced. In Debian, pkgconf seems to have jumped
from 1.8.1 to 2.5.1, which made isecting a little tricky, but doable.
To reproduce:
$ apt install liblowdown-dev libmd-dev- libbsd-dev-
and use this as the test case:
pkgconf --libs --shared lowdown
The culprit seems to be a79952a08428d8f8e7bfff730d7ec536765c555e,
included with 2.4.0. Reverting this commit over 2.5.1 makes the issue go
away. The commit's short description is:
libpkgconf: queue: always walk requires.private lists internally
Neither this commit description, nor 2.4.0's NEWS, mention requiring
Requires.private for shared libraries, as an intended change in
behavior. On the contrary, the immediately previous commit,
86602bc17ee46b5a0dec86e8dd8aff604f1f6856 seems to hint towards the exact
opposite:
pkg: skip over private dependency nodes when --static is not explicitly
requested
That, plus the previously mentioned comment on GitHub around LIBS and
--shared makes me to believe that this is a unintended consequence
rather than a deliberate change, and thus probably a pkgconf bug.
Therefore I'm reassigning this to pkgconf. Looking forward to hear the
package maintainer's and/or upstream's comments on this.
Can you try without reverting that commit, but instead drop the
debian/patches/fix-exists-print-errors.patch patch pkgconf ships but
shouldn’t?
--
Cheers,
Andrej
