Decide on linking & packaging for backends
This issue is a spin-off of #335 (closed) to focus on Cairo & Splash separately from the front-ends.
This mail-list conversation suggested dropping the orphaned .pc files and keeping the back-ends private. More recently though, #83 (closed) was settled by providing the Cairo headers as an unstable API. At least Debian provides both the Splash & Cairo headers (and then some?) in a libpoppler-private-dev
package too.
There is also a suggestion from the email to build the Cairo back-end as a distinct library & allow linking it statically.
I can think of the following questions (and changes when needed) to settle everything:
-
Should Cairo have its own folder like Splash?Not necessary - Should Cairo & Splash be built more modularly (distinct CMakeLists, compile to static libraries)?
-
Should the .pc files be dropped or updated for downstream (add *-uninstalled.pc files if keeping)?Dropped -
Exactly which files should be included in these dev packages (just module-specific headers)?Packaging back-ends discouraged
Possible tags: [build system][cairo][splash]
Edited by Kyle Auble