[Debian GNUstep maintainers] Bug#1093994: popplerkit.framework: FTCBFS: hard codes the build architecture pkg-config

[Yavor Doganov]

Helmut Grohne wrote:
> I happen to have encountered the same issue and prepared a patch. Since
> I don't see anything committed I'm sharing my patch.

Thanks; nothing is committed yet because this will be fixed after the
gnustep-multiarch transition.  We have more important things to do now
as nearly half of the packages FTBFS.

> +--- popplerkit.framework-0.0.20051227svn.orig/config.sh
> ++++ popplerkit.framework-0.0.20051227svn/config.sh
> +-PKG_CONFIG=`which pkg-config 2>/dev/null`
> ++if [ -z "${PKG_CONFIG:-}" ]; then
> ++   PKG_CONFIG=`which pkg-config 2>/dev/null`
> ++fi
> + if [ -z "${PKG_CONFIG}" ]; then
> +    echo "pkg-config not found!"
> +    exit 1

That's a nice improvement of the patch I've prepared as it's
upstream-friendly.  I'll use it; although there's no upstream for this
package, it is technically (much) better.

> --- popplerkit.framework-0.0.20051227svn/debian/rules	2024-06-28 02:28:30.000000000 +0200
> +++ popplerkit.framework-0.0.20051227svn/debian/rules	2025-02-01 11:04:42.000000000 +0100
> +include /usr/share/dpkg/buildtools.mk
> +export PKG_CONFIG

That's unnecessary because gnustep-make's config.mk includes dpkg's
buildtools.mk and exports all variables.  I ended up with the
conclusion that this is the only sane way to add cross support for all
GNUstep packages.  And it happens automatically in almost all cases
(except universal-detector/unar), which is nice.

While thinking how to "multiarchify" GNUstep, for a while I
entertained the idea of installing arch-specific makefiles in
/usr/lib/${DEB_HOST_MULTIARCH}/GNUstep/Makefiles but quickly rejected
it because /usr/bin/gnustep-config exposes many variables and it's not
in a multiarch location.  Sure, it could be moved to another package
but many upstream makefiles run it to determine GNUSTEP_MAKEFILES so
it would fail miserably as that'll be the build architecture script.

gnustep-make itself has (or had?) some support for cross builds (make
target=$triplet) but it doesn't work for me: I think it only works for
the non-flattened layout (which produces the so called "fat" binaries)
or it got broken somewhere in the way.  I think dpkg's buildtools.mk
solves our problem pretty well.  What other distros will do, I don't
know.  We are the pioneers.