activation thought

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2003-10-24 at 06:16, Michael Meeks wrote:

> > I don't speak perl. ;-) 
> 
> 	Would you accept a re-write ? :-) [ it might help adoption ? - then
> again, I have no time to do that ... ].

The decision to do pkg-config in C not Perl, shell, Python, etc. was
very much intentional. (I wrote some non-working code for pkg-config 
that I gave to Havoc initially. I think he loaded the files,
deleted everything, and started over. And I do speak Perl.)

Some reasons:

 - Efficiency. Running pkg-config for each command in a Makefile
   was meant to perform acceptably.

 - Portability. Perl may be available almost everywhere. C compilers
   are available everywhere.

 - Maintainability. Perl can be very maintainable. But the number of
   people who can write maintainable Perl is small. 

Part of the concept of concept of pkg-config is that instead of going
through all sorts of hoops so that the user wouldn't have to install
a tool, we provide a tool that's very easy to install.

The main thing I could see doing to pkg-config to increase adoption
would be to strip down the included copy of glib to something very
thin, simple, and portable so that the tarball was smaller and
it built faster.

Regards,
						Owen