Bug#909846: libglib2.0-dev: absolute paths in gio-2.0.pc break reverse dependencies

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2018 at 10:22:06 -0400, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> I believe we don't consider this a bug in glib2.0.

It doesn't look as though this is going to be changed upstream, so
I don't think diverging is a good idea in the long term; and only
two packages seem to be affected, so fixing those packages seems a
reasonable short-term solution. I've opened RC bugs on tpm2-abrmd
(#910340, proposing the patch that its upstream already applied) and
playerctl (#910342, proposing a new patch that is equally straightforward)
and marked them as blocking this one.

I'm still trying to get clarification from the GLib upstream maintainers
on what their recommendation is for Autotools projects (other than
"stop using Autotools", which might be preferred in the long term but
scales poorly). The two reasonable possibilities seem to be:

    PKG_CHECK_VAR([GDBUS_CODEGEN], [gio-2.0], [gdbus_codegen])

or

    AC_PATH_PROG([GDBUS_CODEGEN], [gdbus-codegen])

(Neither is particularly better than the other for Debian systems; they
only have different characteristics in situations that Debian package
builds shouldn't encounter, such as GLib in a non-default $prefix.)

Either way, anyone with special requirements (e.g. cross-compiling on a
non-Debian system) can use "./configure GDBUS_CODEGEN=my-gdbus-codegen"
to override the default.

    smcv