[Fedora-packaging] [Fwd: devel packages with only one .pc file]

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 10:59 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> And I don't see it being worth the effort to try and come up with
> exceptions to the rule.  There is barely any overhead involved in
> creating a single file devel package (AFAIK).

There *are* some overheads, though -- you duplicate the vast majority of
the package information in the rpmdb and in metadata (thus, more bits to
download for updates, etc).  It also means that the package becomes
multilib[1]

Also, I've now seen pkgconfig files used for things other than
development tasks, although I think that might be kind of crack ;-)

Jeremy

[1] The current mechanism is that we want all devel packages to be
available as multilib as that makes it something a computer can do
rather than something a human maintains[2].  Which is pretty sensible on
the whole.  But it starts to show some fuzziness at the edges when we
talk about only vaguely arch-specific stuff (mono and java are what come
to mind here)
[2] A few years of a human maintaining has shown that it doesn't
work :-)