Hi! On Mon, 2022-08-29 at 15:38:08 +0200, Andrej Shadura wrote: > It seems like the proposal went mostly unnoticed. Any comments, > ideas, anything?
I at least read it, and it looked great. But… > Most importantly, I need a green light from the current pkg-config > maintainer (Tollef) to proceed with the plan. …as it was waiting for this, it slipped my mind. > Meanwhile, I have uploaded an updated version of the package which > dropped the crosswrapper, and instead uses the "personalities" > feature to implement its functionality. The package also no longer > needs a dpkg hook, as it ships a per-architecture symlinks in > arch-specific packages. Thank you for getting rid of both of these annoyances! I switched all my hosts and chroots to pkgconf, when I watched your DebConf presentation and it's been working great. > On Sun, 24 Jul 2022, at 17:33, Andrej Shadura wrote: > > Following a discussion at DebConf, I’d like to officially propose a > > transition > > from pkg-config to pkgconf in Debian. > > > > pkgconf is a newer, actively maintained implementation of pkg-config that > > supports more aspects of the pkg-config file specification and provides a > > library interface that applications can use to incorporate intelligent > > handling of pkg-config files into themselves (such as build file generators, > > IDEs, and compilers). Right, I track the pkg-config upstream git repo and it unfortunately has seen no major development since 2019, and not upstream release since 2017. I've also taken a peek to pkgconf from time to time, and it looks like a nice project, code wise, etc. > > Debian would benefit from switching to pkgconf by utilising a more complete > > implementation of pkg-config that handles aspects of .pc files that > > pkg-config > > does not. For example, Provides rules and Cflags.private rules are > > supported, > > and pkgconf has a better (and less costly) dependency resolver for .pc > > files. Yes. > > Migration plan > > ============== > > > > I believe that it would in the best interests of Debian to only ship one > > pkg-config implementation, so I propose to make pkgconf provide the binary > > package pkg-config without a possibility to fall back to the original > > implementation. This means that after pkgconf takes over the pkg-config > > binary package, all packages depending on pkg-config will be using the > > pkgconf > > implementation without being able to opt out and use the one from > > freedesktop.org. While this may seem limiting, it reduces the probability of > > some packages staying with the freedesktop.org implementation indefinitely > > and > > missing out on bug fixes or suffering from other differences in > > implementation > > details in future when pkgconf becomes even more widespread. If pkg-config was showing signs of activity, then this could perhaps be a potential concern, but given its current state, I think this makes perfect sense. > > In preparation for this migration, I ran a rebuild of all packages depending > > on pkg-config and found only very few failures [5], which may or may not be > > related to the difference in behaviour between pkg-config and pkgconf. I > > will > > perform another rebuild and continue investigating them to provide patches > > during the transition period. Great! Thanks, Guillem