rawhide report: 20070912 changes

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 12:28 -0400, Nalin Dahyabhai wrote:
> 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.
Thanks, for supporting me.-

> 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.
Meanwhile I am considering to add packages called

OpenThreads-devel-dontuse
OpenSceneGraph-devel-dontuse

which would only contain the package config files.
openthreads.pc
and
openscenegraph-2.pc


> 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.
except that these user (Chris) start to shoot a the Fedora package
maintainer and not at upstream ;)

Ralf