Extras i386 rawhide rebuild in mock status 2006-05-29

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 30 May 2006 12:58:23 +0200, Matthias Saou wrote:

> I've
> checked the failure of one of my packages (lighttpd), and found out
> that it's because pkgconfig wasn't installed. Typically something
> simple that we need to reach consensus on (and probably a package
> somewhere providing a .pc file but not requiring pkgconfig).

All -devel packages, which contain .pc files, must require pkgconfig.

Yes, all of those. Including those libraries, which can be used
conveniently without querying pkg-config. And especially those libraries
which store headers in a versioned non-standard path, which is unlikely to
be found without querying pkg-config.

The rationale is simple. Many configure checks fail in non-obvious ways if
pkg-config is not installed. If there is no dependency on pkgconfig it is
too easy to either miss it or uninstall it. And in that case it would need
to become a BuildRequires, which in turn would "solve" the problem at the
wrong place.

Additionally, -devel packages which don't get it right often break the .pc
file dependency chain, so that is the place where to fix the "Requires".