Dear Maintainer,

In HDF5 2.x the compiler wrappers are shell scripts that run pkg-config
to get the compile and link flags. These are h5cc, h5fc and h5c++ in
hdf5-helpers, and h5pcc.<flavor> and h5pfc.<flavor> in
libhdf5-openmpi-dev and libhdf5-mpich-dev. None of these packages
depends on pkg-config, and neither does libhdf5-dev, so on a system
where nothing else has installed it the wrappers fail:

 $ h5cc test.c
 /usr/bin/h5cc: 1: pkg-config: not found
 pkg-config failed with arguments: --define-variable=prefix=/usr --cflags --libs hdf5_serial hdf5_serial_hl

I saw this after installing libhdf5-dev 2.2.0 in a minimal Ubuntu 24.04
container (our rebuild of 2.2.0+repack-5 on the openSUSE Build
Service). The same happens on any system without pkgconf.

The attached patch adds "pkgconf | pkg-config" to Depends of
hdf5-helpers, libhdf5-openmpi-dev and libhdf5-mpich-dev, in both
debian/control and debian/control.in.

Thanks,
Scot Breitenfeld
The HDF Group

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
hdf5, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1152290@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Gilles Filippini <pini@debian.org> (supplier of updated hdf5 package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2026 15:13:05 +0100
Source: hdf5
Architecture: source
Version: 2.2.0+repack-6
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Gilles Filippini <pini@debian.org>
Changed-By: Gilles Filippini <pini@debian.org>
Closes: 1040862 1149918 1152290 1152291 1152292
Changes:
 hdf5 (2.2.0+repack-6) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Drop build-dependency on libcurl4-openssl-dev, unneeded as we don't
     enable ROS3 VFD which depends on aws-c-s3 (not in Debian yet)
     (closes: #1040862, #1149918)
   * Build-Depends on pkgconf, required by the hdf5 helper scripts
     (closes: #1152291)
   * hdf5-helper, libhdf5-{openmpi,mpich}-dev: Depends: pkgconf
     (requested bu h5cc et al; closes: #1152290)
   * New path from upstream PR 6794 to fix testhdf5_fortran link failure
     with LTO (closes: #1152292)
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