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

[Dave Dodge]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2004 at 08:26:07AM -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
[...]
> Elsewhere in this thread someone said that the autotools and pkg-config
> were better than imake because:
> 
>  > since I know that 1) it usually works; 2) it usually does what I tell
>  > it; and 3) when it does misbehave it can usually be hacked/overridden
>  > without a lot of trouble.

I was talking about autotools exclusively, and autoconf in particular.
I didn't intend to include pkg-config in that :-)

I assume that the main reasons pkg-config exists is to unify the
interface for the old individual *-config programs, and to encourage
additional packages to use this sort of mechanism in the first
place. As has been mentioned, this should make the configure scripts
much simpler. I can see this being a good thing for several reasons.

At the same time, I don't like the idea of a central pkg-config
database unless I can trivially override it. I sometimes install
multiple versions of the same library in multiple places on my system,
and then pick and choose specific versions when building an
application that depends on them. pkg-config has the potential of
causing configure to find the "wrong" version of a library in such
cases.

I will say that so far it hasn't been a problem. This is most likely
because for the four big applications I have that end up depending on
pkg-config, each has its own pkg-config repository and its own
dedicated copy of its dependencies [yes, I know this defeats one of
the main benefits of shared libraries]. The day may come when I have
to get configure to find libraries from multiple pkg-config
repositories in a specific order of precedence; that's when I'll
find out for sure whether I like it or not.

                                                  -Dave Dodge