policy on pkg-config?

[Miloslav Trmač]

2014-03-19 11:30 GMT+01:00 Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav at redhat.com>:

> Hello,
>  Is there some policy for package maintainers and pkg-config? My issue
> is that a package (libev) used pkg-config for some time, but later
> dropped it (for legitimate reasons as upstream didn't like that).
> However, should we really care about upstream in cases like that?
>

Very broadly, this isn't too different from upstream making any other
API-breaking change.  We sometimes complain to them, sometimes help them
stop doing that in the future, but typically we don't diverge from upstream
to revert an API break.  Specific circumstances can of course be different.

Apart from the annoyance from having to change my spec file for such a
> change, I find the latter sub-optimal. Now my package hard-codes another
> package's installation path (that may theoretically change at any
> point). Wouldn't in that case, where non-standard paths are being used,
> be better to have the pkg-config file in fedora, even if upstream
> doesn't adopt it?
>

We do have some precedents in this area (openssl adding a pkg-config file
to record flags necessary for our Kerberos-enabled build, adding a
pkg-config file to avoid a multi-lib conflict in /usr/bin/$library-config),
but those I can think about are motivated by needing to solve a specific
problem.  We don't have a general policy to require all libraries to
provide a pkg-config file, or anything similarly broad AFAIK.
    Mirek
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/attachments/20140319/4150b9a0/attachment.html>