Doing a depclean as follows on a minimal stable amd64 chroot as follows: emerge --declean -va --with-bdeps=n Causes the removal of all of the following: virtual/pkgconfig dev-util/pkgconfig dev-libs/glib Subsequent attempts to upgrade @world or any of the above results in a problem with circular dependencies, as pkgconfig needs glib to build ( This is already an issue for stage 3 building in a different way, and they're trying to make pkgconfig use a bundled glib to avoid problems: bug #537330 ) Whereas pkgconf only needs ANSI C89 to install, not glib, avoiding this bootstrap problem, and making the dependency tree slightly smaller in the event people need pkgconfig features, but not glib. NB: In case people have weird eyes or have bad assumptions like I did the first time I saw it: > dev-util/pkgconf # C > dev-util/pkgconfig # Glib
The current default was selected iirc because it was/is the long standing default on all distributions. Now I have no problems if the default changes but there's also bug #537330 we provided to ease this pain point. Last time we wanted releng to have a look/use it, it was discarded as not so painful after all iirc.
You could also in theory have pkgconfig installed by default on stage3 still, while also having the default alternation in the virtual be pkgconf That way the majority of end users would still get the default the most of the world uses, but if they did something aggressive with depcleaning their system wouldn't magically break.
If I don't misremember, last time a change like this was tried, it lead to some arguments... I would at least drop a mail to gentoo-dev ML then to be safe enough :/
Fedora has recently switched to pkgconf: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/pkgconf_as_system_pkg-config_implementation
The bug has been closed via the following commit(s): https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/commit/?id=eb01105187d2c0fe5dfdb45fb3fa3ae49d1292b0 commit eb01105187d2c0fe5dfdb45fb3fa3ae49d1292b0 Author: Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> AuthorDate: 2019-02-04 03:39:45 +0000 Commit: Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> CommitDate: 2019-02-04 03:45:03 +0000 virtual/pkgconfig: Bump to prefer dev-util/pkgconf Blessed by floppym. Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/537330 Closes: https://bugs.gentoo.org/606260 Signed-off-by: Matt Turner <mattst88@gentoo.org> virtual/pkgconfig/pkgconfig-1.ebuild | 17 +++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+)
