Yesterday I filed the remaining 23 bug reports about broken pkgconfig dependency chains in Fedora Core packages: Package 'foo' contains a pkgconfig template file, which lists other pkgconfig files as requirements. When these files are included in other RPM packages, the RPM package "Requires" must be complete. Else pkgconfig fails, prints an error message and returns an error code for standard queries like "pkg-config --exists foo-1.0", "pkg-config --cflags foo-1.0" or "pkg-config --list-all". A detailed list of what RPM "Requires" lines are missing is attached to each bug report. A total of 24 packages in Fedora Core 4 Test 1 are affected this time. Nine out of 24 packages are non -devel packages, which seem to include development related files, such as a pkgconfig .pc file. Most likely they cannot be fixed until a -devel package is split off. Additionally, often such non -devel packages do not "Provides: %name-devel = %version-%release" although they contain devel files. The effect of broken pkgconfig dependencies are really ugly. Excerpt from bug 152169, which is a non -devel package: $ pkg-config --exists gnopernicus-1.0 || echo "no" no $ pkg-config --cflags gnopernicus-1.0 Package cspi-1.0 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `cspi-1.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable Package 'cspi-1.0', required by 'gnopernicus', not found $ rpm --query gnopernicus gnopernicus-0.10.3-1 I'd like to emphasise that a broken pkgconfig dependency chain not only breaks specific queries, but also makes the global "pkg-config --list-all" query, as parsed by some applications, print an error message and return an error code (!), too. It remains broken until all pkgconfig files are installed. So, preferably, RPM package dependencies ought to be complete.
