I've got the following from a debian user/developer (summarized):
The output of "pkg-config --libs avahi-qt3" includes a number of
libraries which only are needed when building static binaries; this
causes unnecessary library dependencies in debian packages:
% pkg-config --libs avahi-qt3
-L/usr/X11R6/lib -lavahi-qt3 -lqt-mt -laudio -lXt -ljpeg -lpng -lz -lXi
-lXrender -lXrandr -lXcursor -lXinerama -lXft -lfreetype -lfontconfig
-lXext -lX11 -lm -lSM -lICE -ldl -lpthread
Replacing:
Requires: qt-mt >= 3.0.0 with Requires.private: qt-mt >= 3.0.0
in avahi-qt3.pc.in should do the job.
The full bugreport is available at: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=347710
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/11/msg00016.html contains the following explanation about Requires.private:
- Fix your pkg-config .pc files.
If you are a library maintainer, *you* can help make library transitions
easier by making sure you aren't contributing to the problem. The
second biggest source of bogus lib dependencies is pkg-config. If you
have a library package that provides a .pc file for use with pkg-config,
please make sure that your upstream is using the Requires.private field.
This field, added by Tollef Fog Heen in pkgconfig 0.18, makes it
possible to separate out the libs everyone needs to link against for a
package from the libs that are only needed for static linking. If your
upstream hasn't adopted this field yet, please encourage them to do so!
Since support for this field has been recently added, your package
probably needs a build-dependency on pkg-config (>= 0.18) in order to
use it. For example usage, please see /usr/lib/pkgconfig/cairo.pc in
the libcairo2-dev package.
Probably more of the avahi pkgconfig files can use an update like this, but i didn't investigate them.
