wlroots dependency not found, unless one specifies an explicit version

[sneakertack]

Running Niri on Arch Linux. Building can fail with the following error:

meson.build:9:14: ERROR: Dependency "wlroots" not found, tried pkgconfig and cmake

Presumably, wlroots has switched to an explicitly-versioned naming scheme, such that libwlroots.so usually no longer exists, but e.g. libwlroots-0.19.so does. I can't find when wlroots made this switch, but here's an Arch mailing post referencing the issue (where they also discuss renaming the corresponding Arch packages).

In my case I've fixed this locally by checking what version of wlroots I have installed...

$ ldconfig -p | grep -i wlroots
	libwlroots-0.19.so (libc6,x86-64) => /usr/lib/libwlroots-0.19.so

And then specifying that version in meson.build accordingly:

- dep_wlroots = dependency('wlroots')
+ dep_wlroots = dependency('wlroots-0.19')

After which it builds successfully.

[Ultra-Smork]

Thank god there are such people as you