pkg-config and rpm relocations

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Kevin Fox <Kevin.Fox at pnl.gov> schrieb:

Hi,

> Its a chicken and the egg problem. Its hard to get shared libraries
> relocatable because the build system gets in the way. The build system
> guys don't want to make the build system handle it well because few
> shared library properly support it.

actually, I don't see any valid reason for relocatable libraries at all
(besides, perhaps, broken-by-design OS'es like Windoze, which still 
stick in concepts obsoleted by decades, like CP/CMS'es drive letters
from 1967 ...)

Note: changing installation pathes also changes semantics.
I'd _never_ _ever_ do that w/o a _full_ package rebuild 
(including post-build checks, etc).

> I am trying to convince some of my coworkers to switch to using
> pkg-config for their current libraries. 

Definitively a good idea. By my company's qm policies, a library not 
providing proper pkg-config descriptor is simply declared *broken*.
(IOW: no stable release w/o it, whatsoever)

> They have a requirement that their libraries are relocatable currently,
> so they do work already.

What exactly do they want it for, and why would pkg-config need
to support that ?

pkg-config is used only in build stage: the client ask it for proper 
flags to import some library, and the imported library package just
provides the necessary information by a little text file. that's all.

If the package manager then later moves around the libraries to
different places, it's not our (pkg-config) business ;-p
(within that process, the .pc files would have to be rewritten,
of course)

> If I can't fix pkg-config, or at least work around it using option 1, 
> then the number of users using pkg-config won't grow.

The number of users is not relevant, the number of ported packages is.

Each library package I get into my fingers, which does not provide
.pc yet, will be fixed to do so.


cu
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 Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/

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