using pkg-config for dynamic release packaging

[Dan Nicholson]

On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Thomas Stover
<thomas at wsinnovations.com> wrote:
> Hi, new to the list. pkg-config helps my life out a ton. I've been
> working on adding some installer creation features to a build system
> (you know like rpm, deb, setup.exe, etc), and I had a thought. Let's say
> you had a program or a library that you wanted to build a package for,
> and you new that this component required another piece, 'X', that uses
> pkg-config. Wouldn't it be nifty if you could do something like
> "pkg-config --runtimedependencies X" or something like that to assist in
> building either a file list or lists of "required" packages. Has this
> come up before? Is there something kind of like this already? I did
> consider making some new .pc files with names like x-install-needs.pc or
> something, and reinterpreting the --libs and --cflags for other
> purposes. One trick in making a reusable solution is that some
> environments would really need a list of required packages, while others
> actual files. Maybe two flags?

Fedora uses this patch for generating rpm Requires/Provides from .pc files.

http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/pkgconfig/devel/pkgconfig-0.15.0-reqprov.patch?view=markup

I don't know if it'll ever make it into an upstream release.

--
Dan