Subject: Re: dependencies from libtool and pkg-config files

From: Michel Dänzer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 20:20:53 +0200

On Thu, 2003-08-28 at 23:22, Joey Hess wrote:
> Michel Dänzer wrote:
> > 
> > > I think you would be better served by adding something to lintian to try
> > > to detect missing -dev dependnecies, and filing some bug reports. Unlike
> > > shared library dependnencies, -dev dependencies rarely change, and when
> > > they do, the package maintainer always has reason to know about it (they
> > > have to change the build dependnecies too).
> > 
> > But the main point of my proposal is exactly that packages should only
> > have to build-depend on packages they use directly, not also on other
> > packages those happen to depend on.
> 
> That's already common practice.

It's always been supposed to be that way, sure, unfortunately reality
looks quite different sometimes.

> > Similarly, if I want to write a program that uses say libpisock, I want
> > to just install libpisock-dev, I don't care that it needs
> > libreadline4-dev as well. And neither should the libpisock-dev
> > maintainer have to.
> 
> I disagree; if the libpisock-dev maintainer does not know what other
> development packages are used by his package, he needs to find out.

He'll see it in the generated dependencies. :)

> Especially since this set will be quite similar to what his package must
> build-depend on. I'm not sure if that was intended as a concrete
> example, but note that libpisock-dev in fact depends on libncurses-dev.

But where's the dependency on libreadline4-dev? This little example I
dug up quickly may be flawed, but I've seen many more while tracking
down autobuild failures on powerpc.

BTW, as you correctly observed that this would be very similar to what
dpkg-shlibdeps does, maybe it could be extended with this functionality
relatively easily? I took a quick look at it, but that reminded me why I
don't like some aspects of perl. :\

-- 
Earthling Michel Dänzer   \  Debian (powerpc), XFree86 and DRI developer
Software libre enthusiast  \     http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=daenzer