forwarding to the appropriate mailing list. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Zabaluev Mikhail (Nokia-MS/Helsinki) Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 8:12 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [MeeGo-dev] Mandatory use of pkgconfig in BuildRequires?
Hi, I'm porting some packages for MeeGo and I was told that usage of build requirement targets such as pkgconfig(foo) is preferable whenever a package provides the file foo.pc. I can't see this policy written down anywhere yet, and I have doubts about its universal usefulness. The cases when a pkg-config file is checked by the dependent package's build process clearly benefit from this approach; this is what the dependent package actually requires, and if the owner package for the .pc file changes name or some contents, the dependency needs not be changed for all dependent packages. However, many build configurations actually use not the .pc file, but qMake configuration add-ons or some other way (up to just blindly expecting the headers to be at some listed location, but this is a pathological case). Following the pkgconfig in this case may be as brittle as using the explicit package name, while obscuring the actual dependency. I may be obsessing about this minor detail too much, but then why do MeeGo packagers obsess about making that pkgconfig indirection mandatory? If frequent renaming of packages is the reason, then: 1) Provides/Obsoletes were designed for this; 2) just name them carefully the first time? Regards, Mikhail _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
