[Bug 641423] mingw32-gcc installs files both inside and outside the sysroot

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=641423

--- Comment #5 from Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini at redhat.com> 2011-01-29 09:26:33 EST ---
I believe this lets other packages express their dependencies better.  In
particular, there is no need for libraries to depend on a compiler: they only
need the runtime libraries of the compiler.  gtk+ and SDL should not be
different in this respect: either both should depend on a compiler or none
should.  The fact that gtk+ indirectly uses the pthreads emulation library
doesn't change anything.  

In short, Fedora devel packages never require a compiler, but a few mingw32
packages do.  For this reason, I believe the fact that MinGW packages are
always -devel packages is irrelevant.

As an aside, I don't believe the MinGW SIG mission totally excludes the
presence of -devel package.  Separating them would still be very useful,
because it would distinguish files that need to be deployed on Windows, and
files that are for development only.  This is on the hypothesis that those
Fedora users also need to distribute their applications after having
cross-compiled them. :)

In order to automate the distribution task, I'm leveraging RPM package
dependencies to list what needs to be deployed on Windows, and then make
self-contained application installers.  Having separate -devel packages would
be nicer for me, because I would have an easy way to know what has to be
deployed on Windows, and what is for development only.  However, I understand
that it would be a big change and I can live without it.

This leads back to the rationale behind reporting this bug.  If the
cross-compiled product depends on files outside the sysroot, that should be a
fatal error, because this would be a dependency on something available on Linux
only.  Currently I have to ignore them and eliminate a possibly useful
diagnostic, so I opened this bug.

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