On 06/22/2010 05:55 PM, Parag N(पराग़) wrote: > Hi, >     I see minimal build environment always pulling pkgconfig and also > we have " There is no need to include the following packages or their > dependencies as BuildRequires because they would occur too often." > written in packaging guidelines[1]. Does this mean I can recommend in > new package reviews or existing package owners to drop BuildRequires: > pkgconfig in spec files? No, packages which utilize pkg-config while building should require BR: pkgconfig. The fact pkgconfig is often indirectly pulled-in (in most cases by other *-devel packages) while building is a just a reflection of the state of these "other packages" were in when they had been built. Though it's unlikely to happen, they may drop or loose their *.pc's at any time and thus loose this implicit dependency on pkgconfig. What is supposed to be safe is to drop "Requires: pkgconfig", because today's rpmbuild is supposed to add this dependency automatically.

Parag N(पराग़) wrote, at 06/23/2010 12:55 AM +9:00: > Hi, > I see minimal build environment always pulling pkgconfig and also > we have " There is no need to include the following packages or their > dependencies as BuildRequires because they would occur too often." > written in packaging guidelines[1]. Does this mean I can recommend in > new package reviews or existing package owners to drop BuildRequires: > pkgconfig in spec files? > > Parag. > > [1]https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Exceptions_2 While currently I have no strong positive or negative opinion for this, I just note that the reason that currently even minimal buildroot always pulls pkgconfig in is because rpm-build package has explicit "Requires: pkgconfig" . See: * Wed Dec 03 2008 Panu Matilainen <pmatilai(a)redhat.com&gt; - make rpm-build require pkgconfig (#473978)