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

[Paul Howarth]

Michael Schwendt wrote:
> 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".

Two questions:

1. should bugs be raised on packages like freetype, which has a -devel 
subpackage that includes a .pc file but has no dep on pkgconfig?

2. If the answer to the first question is yes, should the raised bug be 
a blocker of the BuildReqBlocker bug? Or should it be a blocker of a bug 
for a specific package that's failing to build because pkg-config is not 
present (as in Matthias' example).

Something as low down in the dependency chain as freetype could 
potentially fix a lot of package build issues.

Paul.