introduce pkg-config files

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Pavol Rusnak <prusnak at opensuse.org> wrote:
> Have you read the blogpost I mentioned in my original email? Currently
> main KDE4 devel package has different name in every major distro. If
> pkg-config file was present then requiring symbol pkgconfig(kde4) would
> be enough.

I'm curious about this.

IIUC, what you are proposing is we add a list of the exported symbols
in each library (or is it package?) to the .pc files, so that
dependencies are in set as "I need this symbol, give me the package
which provides it" instead of "I need this package".

Now, the idea is good if we can integrate that with the build system
and make it work but I have two questions:
- how are you going to deal with name mangling? nm -DC , then dump to
the .pc file? In that case,
- how are you going to avoid "transitive" symbols (i. e. symbols which
are exported by a particular library but are not actually provided by
it but one of its dependencies) ? For instance, then I nm -DC
libkdecore.so.5.5.0 I get some "false positives":

00236a50 T strlcat
00236b00 T strlcpy
00174e50 T qHash(KPluginInfo const&)
000fc730 T qHash(KUrl const&)

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)