RFC: .pc meta package

[Tollef Fog Heen]

]] Enrico Weigelt 

Hi,

| I'm still encountering a lot of packages which still don't provide
| .pc files (and upstreams often dont see the need for that :().
| So instead of continuing to maintain dozens of workarounds for
| certain package's selfmade lookup (more precisely: wide-guessing)
| mechanisms, I'd prefer to create an metapackage that just scans
| for certain installed packages that dont have .pc files yet and
| creates them into some separate directly that gets the lowest
| priority in pkg-config's search path (so they dont conflict when
| some upstream adds .pc files later).
| 
| What you think about this idea ?

First, I see the use case and the attractiveness of the idea.

I don't think it's a particularly good idea, since it's easy for the
.pc file to end up having wrong data for a given package.  Also, the .pc
file name is part of the API of the package, so it should be decided by
upstream (glib.pc vs glib-2.0.pc).

Are you seeing resistance to shipping the .pc files upstream or are
upstreams just slow?

All this said, you're of course free to ship such a package, I just
don't happen to think it's a good idea.

regards,
-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are