rawhide report: 20070912 changes

[Nalin Dahyabhai]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2007 at 04:10:34PM +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 <at> freenet.de> writes:
> > >  At one point in time, all
> > > the options had to be supplied to the "configure" script. 
> > This still applies, this is what "packaging is about".
> 
> You're forgetting that not everyone who compiles software is a packager. Having 
> to set CFLAGS and LIBS by hand might be acceptable to you as a packager, but 
> most upstream projects will not consider this an acceptable solution, because 
> they also have to support compilation from a tarball and want to make that as 
> simple as possible.
> 
> Now, of course, adding the .pc file in Fedora only won't help users on other 
> distributions, but that's why you as a maintainer are expected to talk to 
> upstream about such issues instead of sticking your head in the sand.

Forgive me for wading in here, but upstream *has* to be where .pc files
show up, and if they don't show up there, we absolutely shouldn't be
adding them to binary packages.  I believe this very strongly.

Including a .pc file in a -devel package suggests, to maintainers of
projects which use that -devel package, that the .pc file can be
depended upon to always be there when the library is, that it's safe to
have configure scripts depend on their presence.

If I were a maintainer of a package which depended on a .pc file, and I
started getting reports from people who couldn't install my package
because they built a depended-upon package from source (because they're
on another operating system or Linux flavor), and I then tracked the
root cause down to my dependence on a .pc file which isn't available
everywhere, I'd feel betrayed.

Cheers,

Nalin