Mac OS X and pkg-config

[Michael Stahl]

On 10.06.2015 13:30, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 01:17:07PM +0200, David Tardon wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 04:30:45PM +0200, Michael Stahl wrote:
>>> On 09.06.2015 16:20, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
>>>> Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>>>>> But neither is it very useful to have the already small set of OS X -based
>>>>> developers split into those who use a pure upstream way to build, those who
>>>>> use HomeBrew libjpeg but bundled Python, those who use MacPorts Python and
>>>>> libjpeg, etc.
>>>>>
>>>> Maybe. But is that really so different on Linux (where we seem to
>>>> cope)? And I guess Khaled's intention is to rather grow the pool of
>>>> Mac hackers, by removing one very early point of frustration ...
>>>
>>> we cope with this on Linux mainly because we have distribution package
>>> maintainers who actually work on having our build system pick up
>>> $random_distro_of_the_week's inconsistently packaged system libraries
>>> properly.
>>
>> ... and even so we fail to ensure that system headers/libs are not used
>> if one configures without them. E.g., as soon as one installs system
>> boost (or mdds, or glm, or...), it will be used no matter what value
>> SYSTEM_BOOST contains. Simply because -I/usr/include is in include path
>> before -I$W/UnpackedTarball/boost. But we do not seem to care overly
>> about this...

well that's a bug that needs fixing anyway.  -I/usr/include shouldn't be
on the command line because it's a default search path already.

i don't see a bare /usr/include in my config_host.mk, any idea where
that is coming from?

> So why Mac OS X is treated differently, what is so special about it?

Mac OS X is an actual operating system with an actual SDK that defines
the stable and supported interfaces of the platform.  GNU/Linux on the
other hand is a random collection of packages with mostly undocumented
stability and support properties.  i don't believe that making
developer's lives harder in the long term by allowing them to treat Mac
OS X as a random collection of packages is worth any short term benefit.