Mac OS X and pkg-config

[Michael Stahl]

On 10.06.2015 11:43, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 12:36:41PM +0300, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>>> Some of us work on other opensource projects on our Mac machines which
>>> happen to need MacPorts or HomeBrew.
>>>
>>> Having LibreOffice simply say "I refuse to build on this machine because
>>> you've already installed some other stuff" is not very friendly.
>>>
>>
>> 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.
> 
> No, that what I want to achieve, what I want is to make sure LibreOffice
> builds the same way regardless of the presence or absence of pkg-config
> on Mac OS X, so that is no longer needs to stop the build if one is
> found.

i've slightly improved the error message now to "Please modify your PATH
variable so that $PKG_CONFIG is no longer found by configure scripts."
with commit
ada6281a5bd74d0ff6ae578d57f39f65b7c25103 so it's at least obvious what
to do.

but since we already have PATH in config_host.mk it would perhaps be
possible to detect which directory the pkg-config is found in and
automatically filter that out of $PATH (unless it's something that
cannot be removed like /usr/bin).  would that be an improvement for you,
and/or would anybody object to that?

also, it is theoretically possible to export PKG_CONFIG="" or something
like that to override it in our bundled external libraries, but whether
that will actually work for every single one would require testing; i
can easily imagine hard-coded fallbacks and whatnot.