devel packages with only one .pc file

[Alexander Larsson]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 13:02 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 17:42 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > A typical example is gtk-sharp2-devel. It contains only four pc files.
> > There are no headers or anything, because for mono you don't need
> > anything but the dll.
> > 
> > Another example is in mono. Here the "mono-nunit" subpackage contains a
> > similar pkg-config file. This case is even weirder, because nunit (being
> > a framework for developing unit tests) is clearly already a development
> > application, and you wouldn't really install it if you weren't already
> > doing development.
> 
> Perhaps in the case of mono, where the main package has no difference
> between the runtime and the development files (one in the same) then
> the .pc file can stay in the main package.  I'm OK with that.

So, can we change the packaging guidelines to say this? (Otherwise I'll
be flooded with more bug reports.)

> > In many cases these pc files have not pc file dependencies, and in
> > others they only have dependencies on pc files where the pc file also
> > didn't have to be in a -devel subpackage, so this isn't always a
> > problem.
> 
> But it is something to take into consideration.  If the .pc has listed
> requires that would in turn pull in other -devel packages, then it
> should be split itself into a -devel package and the requires listed as
> such.  This prevents a normal userland install from being polluted by
> -devel packages just for the runtime components.

Sure. And in the majority of cases we really should have the .pc file in
a devel package. Its just that in some cases there really is no need for
it, and its not without negative consequenses.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a scrappy overambitious waffle chef She's a mistrustful cigar-chomping 
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