Package: debhelper
Severity: wishlist

Hi,

I’m attaching a new debhelper script named dh_devlibs. As the name says,
it is meant for development libraries.

Currently it does two things:
      * Cleanup of the dependency_libs field in .la files, to avoid
        having libtool explicitly link to all indirect dependencies.
        This will allow to remove the existing hacks to that effect.
      * Generation of a dev:Depends dependency field, based on the
        contents of pkg-config files. This will remove the need to check
        which build-dependencies also need to be -dev dependencies, and
        to keep the versions in sync.

It would be nice to include it in debhelper.

Thanks,

As Guillem Jover noticed, I was confused about the meaning of
DEB_HOST_GNU_TYPE and DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE.

Here is a new version that fixes this.

Cheers,

        Hey

 Thanks on working on this new tool!

 I wonder whether it's a good idea to mix handling of *.la and *.pc;
 perhaps you should split that in two helpers or allow disabling either
 support via command-line flags so that package maintainers can opt to
 use this or that feature on this or that package.

 I read quickly through the script and wondered aboud a couple of
 things.

 * I wondered whether parsing of Build-Depends could be done in a
   common Debhelper control file parsing function, or even in dpkg-dev
 * the behavior to use either Build-Depends (Debian specified) or .pc
   versions (upstream specified) is not controllable; I wonder whether
   only one behavior should be implemented.

 My personal wish would be to use a similar system for .pc than shlibs:
 packages shipping .pc files would provide a minimum version to depend
 on and that's what we would use.  Perhaps taking the highest of this
 version and the bdep could be offered as a flag?

   Thanks!

Le dimanche 05 juillet 2009 à 01:15 +0100, Loïc Minier a écrit :

I wondered that at the time of writing, but it’s not exceptional for a
debhelper to do several things that are only loosely related.

Since the script supports -X, you can easily ignore either of libtool
stuff or pkg-config stuff using it.

Certainly, if it can be useful for something else. I’m not sure what the
debhelper policy is in this case.

It relies on the fact that versioned dependencies, when specified in
the .pc file, are correct. If they are not, why leave them at all?
The .pc should be fixed in this case.

I’m afraid we would lose some of the flexibility that build-depends
currently allow. We would end up always depending on the latest version.

Cheers,

This looks *very* promising!

Is there any chance this makes it into debhelper 8?

  - Fabian