[Xlibs] Re: [cairo] COPYING files....

[Keith Packard]

Around 8 o'clock on Feb 13, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> So is there any real difference in the end between imake and pkg-config?
> You still end up having to have the correct settings set up for both, and
> it's still possible for the OS distributor to screw up both.

I think that's a fair question.  They do both involve configuration files 
installed by the package which are separate from the actual libraries.

However, pkg-config solves a much smaller problem, all that it does is
provide C compiler options for building and linking against the library.
The configuration files it uses hold no global information, only
information pertaining to a specific library.

Right now, the various configure scripts only require pkg-config for
libraries which are hosted exclusively at freedesktop.org; anything
provided by the system, or which may be supplied from another source is
detected by a combination of pkg-config and more traditional autoconf
methods.

pkg-config is a compromise that makes writing configure scripts far 
easier; if we find it isn't working for some libraries, we can go back and 
replace that code with more flexible alternative configure methods.

-keith