Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek wrote:
In fact, we should probably make the effort to add pkgconf files for
the
few libraries that don't have it to make it completely standard and
expected.
That is a particularly bad idea. Downstream .pc files are a nuisance. If
someone develops upstream software on Fedora, they will end up relying on
those .pc files, thinking they are a supported way to link that library,
then only after releasing the code, finding out that those .pc files do not
exist upstream or in any other distribution (or worse, other distributions
may have their own, incompatible, downstream .pc file for the same library).
I have already been in that situation as a developer. It just sucked.
If a library does not support pkg-config upstream, you MUST NOT use pkg-
config to find it. It is not portable. So shipping such a downstream .pc
file advertises a false interface to developers.
Kevin Kofler