rawhide report: 20060207 changes

[Mike A. Harris]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 03:34 -0500, Build System wrote:
> 
>>New package gnome-python2-desktop
> 
> 
>>autoconf-2.59-6
>>---------------
>>* Mon Feb 06 2006 Karsten Hopp <karsten at redhat.de> 2.59-6
>>- check for Xlib.h instead of Intrinsic.h to find X11 headers
>>  (#176379)
> 
> 
> Not necessarily a good idea, because this renders FC generated configure
> scripts unnecessarily incompatible to FSF autoconf generated ones.
> 
> Furthermore, the whole idea of checking for "X11 headers" is arguable,
> because the concept of common directories for "X11-includes/libraries"
> doesn't apply anymore with modular X anymore. Instead, we now have a
> "set of X11 devel packages", which just "happen to be installed to a
> common prefix".
> 
> I would eagerly plea to revert this change.

I'd go one step further, and consider the change to be a bug. All
of the X libraries install pkgconfig *.pc files in X11R7.0 as a
standard.  Various other things like the SDK, font utils, etc.
also install pkgconfig files.

All packages in the distribution which need to know where the X
headers are installed, or need to know anything that is supplied
via the pkgconfig files, should use pkg-config to find it.

If a package wishes to retain build time compatibility with
X11R6 et al. it could use fallbacks if the pkg-config files
aren't present, however from here on out, using pkgconfig
is the very highly recommended way to detect the X libraries
and other bits and pieces.



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.