Re: libcurl in libpq.pc

On Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 4:30 PM Jacob Champion
<jacob(dot)champion(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On my machine, pkgconf appears to recognize Requires.internal, but
> unfortunately it doesn't seem to ignore the internal requirements for
> --cflags. So... I don't get it.

To avoid having this hang in the air forever: there appears to be
considerable confusion and/or disagreement [1] about the meaning of an
internal dependency. Probably not too surprising, since the proposal I
linked above was implemented in pkgconf before the final patchset was
proposed to pkg-config. So it just kind of does whatever it does
today, I guess. (This behavior is problematic for Meson as well [2].)

The original pkg-config maintainers in that freedesktop thread appear
to have responded to the Debian use case (where you want to minimize
the number of needed developer dependencies) with EDONTCARE. Not much
I can do about that. I think that moving this forward is going to need
multiple interested communities politely lobbying pkgconf to change
behavior.

I'm not currently planning to change the .pc file for 18.1, since
there's a way forward for Debian (albeit one we really don't like),
and the current behavior was crafted to meet a requested use case.
IMO, changes we make here should not regress what was tested in [3]
unless we really cannot bear the cost. We need a working
Requires.internal to make everyone happy.

Thanks,
--Jacob

[1] https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf/issues/318
[2] https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/12227
[3] https://postgr.es/m/9badbeeb-a432-48d4-8710-c8254a54d428%40technowledgy.de