Re: automagic pkg-config search path detection is bad, please remove it

[Ariadne Conill]

Hi,

On Mon, 25 Oct 2021, Thomas Dickey wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 06:32:07AM -0500, Ariadne Conill wrote:
>
> ...abusive rant snipped.

I'm sorry that you feel my "rant" was abusive.

None-the-less, with the changes made in ncurses 6.3, you have 
effectively declared the pkgconf debug output to be a stable interface, 
without even communicating with me, or from what I have been told, any 
other maintainer of any pkg-config implementation.

You might not see it that way, but it is the reality: if pkgconf now 
changes its debug output, in such a way that it breaks the ncurses build, 
I will not hear the end of it until that change is reverted.  This means 
that I will now have to build infrastructure to do regression testing 
against the *debug* output, to ensure that there is no regression 
introduced to it, because of your decision to start scraping it.  All of 
this new regression testing imposes a significant burden on me, and that 
burden was imposed without my consent.

I believe as free software maintainers, we should try to respect each 
other, which includes not throwing each other under the bus by imposing 
undue burdens upon each other.

Please respect the maintainers of pkg-config implementations by using only 
stable interfaces, and not scraping debug output.  Other projects are 
likely to copy your autoconf macro into their own projects, which will 
reinforce the burden you have imposed on the collective maintainers of 
pkg-config implementations to provide stable interface guarantees for 
*debug* output.

Ariadne