On Mon, 2011-12-19 at 10:15 +0100, Tom Gundersen wrote:

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 9:50 AM, Jan de Groot wrote:

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n randomly looking at files and directories, I

...

found /usr/share/pkgconfig and though: "this ain't right"

For architecture-independent packages like the ones in todo, /usr/share/pkgconfig is a perfectly valid place to store these files. It's also in the default lookup path, so there's no reason to rebuild all these packages.

I had a look into this. According to pkg-config man both /usr/{share,lib}/pkgconfig seem to be equally valid. As to my package (udev) there is no clean way to move the pkgconfig files out of share without also moving the man pages, so I'd rather not unless there is a good reason (in which case I'll push a patch upstream).

The reason for /usr/share/pkgconfig is mainly for multilib systems. The 32bit version of pkg-config will look into /usr/lib32/pkgconfig, the 64bit version whill look into /usr/lib/pkgconfig, or whatever libdirs are in a distribution. For multi-arch packages like xkeyboard-config, it would mean that it has to install two pc files. Instead of that, /usr/share/pkgconfig is used. Moving these files out of /usr/share means that our multilib repository will have to fork packages that are architecture-independent. BTW: As for /usr/share/pkgconfig/udev.pc: that .pc file is installed to make clear where udev and its rules files are installed. As it's not a library, there's nothing wrong with installing it there. Rule files are quite the same on i686 and x86_64.