[Glade-devel] Spurious Requires in gladeui-1.0.pc?

[Tristan Van Berkom]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 3:00 AM, Debarshi Ray <debarshi.ray at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Glade needs libxml to link and run
>> so that needs to stay
>
> The pkgconfig file is not checked when Glade is run. As glade and
> libgladeui links to libxml2.so.2, the glade3 and glade3-libgladeui
> packages would have a runtime dependency on libxml2.
>
> Now the *.pc files are a part of the -devel or -dev subpackages. If
> libxml2 is mentioned in gladeui-1.0.pc, then glade3-libgladeui-devel
> gets a runtime dependency on libxml2-devel, which does not seem
> necessary.
>
> Since the *.pc files are only consulted at build time, usually by the
> configure script, it can not do much to enforce any runtime
> requirements. It can only enforce compile time requirements. For
> example, after successfully building and installing glade someone can
> try to delete libxml2.so.2 and the only barrier would be a
> distribution's package management system and not the gladeui-1.0.pc.

Sure, we can only do what we can, if you're developing with the Glade
headers you need a functional installation of the Glade core, which
means you need libxml2, whether you need to specify -lxml2 to link
against libgladeui I think is irrelevant here.

Cheers,
          -Tristan