Improving the way we select multilib packages for trees

[Matthias Clasen]

On Mon, 2006-05-01 at 13:55 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> writes:
> > Joe Orton (jorton at redhat.com) said: 
> >> Nobody has come up with a feasible plan for dealing with 
> >> %{_bindir}/foo-config scripts AFAIK.
> 
> > Port package to pkgconfig. Write foo-config script that calls pkg-config.
> 
> (1) How many upstream projects will take back changes to make their
> foo-config scripts depend on pkgconfig?  I'm afraid this proposed
> solution will mean we end up maintaining many local forks of foo-config.
> 
> (2) pkg-config isn't psychic either.  As near as I can tell from a quick
> read of its man page, the only way it can solve the problem is if
> rpmbuild sets PKG_CONFIG_PATH to select either 32- or 64-bit libraries.
> While that's adequate for solving our own build problems, it doesn't
> help for people doing ordinary source builds of library-using software;
> from their point of view foo-config is still broken.  And this makes it
> even less likely that any upstreams will take back the foo-config
> changes, because the "solution" depends not only on pkgconfig but on a
> worldview that says RPM is the only build environment that matters.

Setting up PKG_CONFIG_PATH is hardly something that only rpm can do...