according to the libwebsockets.pc, this is intended behavior:

prefix="/nix/store/0xdhyq4hj6ypa0lrsqnasz5cnjcjxr61-libwebsockets-3.2.0"
exec_prefix=${prefix}
libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=${prefix}/include

Name: libwebsockets
Description: Websockets server and client library
Version: 3.2.0

Libs: -L${libdir} -lwebsockets
Cflags: -I${includedir}

if openssl and libuv were meant to be propagated, you would see another line like:

Libs.private: -luv -ldl -lssl -lcrypto

However, this doesn't mean that the package has an incorrect .pc, which it likely does.

Personally, I'm against propagating libraries because it adds the dev closure (and transitively the dev closure of all dependencies) to package's runtime closure, see #71553 for an example bloat

But practical use of libwebsockets requires these dependencies, no?

The added closure size seems marginal to me:

nix path-info -Sh ./result # after                           
/nix/store/10wc552m2xacsaqfab5vac65ihp8gjsz-libwebsockets-3.2.0	 188.5M

nix path-info -Sh ./result # before
/nix/store/0xdhyq4hj6ypa0lrsqnasz5cnjcjxr61-libwebsockets-3.2.0	 186.4M

If this is an issue we should take upstream, this could just be a stopgap... 🤷‍♂️

Thank you for your contributions.

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Seeing as this has been inactive for 6 months, and it's likely not intended behavior from upstream, im going to close