[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#1146800: timg: ftbfs with openslide 4.0.1 in experimental

[Benjamin Gilbert]

On Sun, Sep 6, 2026 at 12:51 PM Tobias Frost <tobi at debian.org> wrote:
> I'd therefore suggest that we first determine why pkgconf is resolving
> Requires.private for a normal query, and whether the OpenSlide .pc file is
> appropriate for Debian's pkgconf semantics, rather than adding OpenSlide's
> entire set of private build dependencies to libopenslide-dev.

This is a longstanding shortcoming of pkg-config.  I fully agree that
the ecosystem should distinguish between header dependencies and
library dependencies needed for static linking, but it doesn't, and a
lot of electrons have been spilled trying to get the pkgconf
maintainers to support this use case.  As things stand, openslide.pc
is properly declaring its dependencies for static linking, which
necessarily causes the header dependencies to balloon out of control.

(OpenSlide doesn't make this decision directly; it delegates to
Meson's support for generating .pc files.)