[BUGZILLA #17744] pkg-config file should not contain user's LDFLAGS

[MichaelChirico]

When building the pkg-config file for libR in src/unix/Makefile.in, the following stanza,

install-pc:
@$(MKINSTALLDIRS) "$(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/pkgconfig"
-@$(SED) -e "s:@RHome:$(rhome):"
-e "s:@rincludedir:$(rincludedir):"
-e "s:@rarch:$(R_ARCH):"
-e 's:@libsprivate:$(STATIC_LIBR_PC):'
-e 's:@Others:$(MAIN_LDFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS):'
-e 's/@VERSION/$(VERSION)/' $(srcdir)/libR.pc.in \

"$(DESTDIR)$(libdir)/pkgconfig/libR.pc"

combines MAIN_LDFLAGS with LDFLAGS and sticks it into the "Libs" field of the resulting libR.pc file. That's not what you want: LDFLAGS contains the user's linker flags at this point, i.e. whatever they have in their environment variable. This was reported in

https://bugs.gentoo.org/515428

and fixed by

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/dev-lang/R/files/R-3.6.2-no-LDFLAGS-in-libR-pkg-config.patch

If you dig into "man pkg-config", you can eventually deduce that "pkg-config --libs" should output

all linker flags required to link the packages on the command line,
including flags for all their dependencies

Whatever the user has in LDFLAGS is superfluous to that, and can cause problems besides.

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METADATA

• Bug author - Michael Orlitzky
• Creation time - 2020-03-25 21:57:27 UTC
• Bugzilla link
• Status - UNCONFIRMED
• Alias - None
• Component - Installation
• Version - R 3.6.xx
• Hardware - Other Linux
• Importance - P5 enhancement
• Assignee - R-core
• URL -