[RFC] Use glib-2.0 exclusively

[Paul Bender]

On 8/24/2010 5:48 PM, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Dan Nicholson<dbn.lists at gmail.com>  schrieb:
>
>> It might be easier to avoid the inevitable complaints and keep
>> the bundled library. Otherwise we're basically shifting the
>> support burdento the glib folks.
>
> And to hundreds of individual package maintainers. Circular
> dependencies are an NO GO in clean software engineering ;-O

I agree that circular dependencies are very annoying when building a 
system from scratch (as I do with MiniMyth). However, I agree that 
continuing to have a a dependency (whether internal or external) on a 
package that is essentially obsolete is very annoying.

Maybe a solution is to adopt the solution that GCC adopts for its 
circular dependency on packages such as gmp, mpc and mpfr. If you have 
extracted these packages to the top level directory of gcc, then it will 
compile and use those. Otherwise, it will attempt to use the versions of 
these libraries installed on the system.

GCC does this because it wants to use versions compiled with the same 
version of GCC. However, I cannot see any reason that pkg-config could 
not do the same thing with glib2 (and its dependencies: zlib). That is, 
glib2 and zlib are present in the root source directory, then build 
those. As long pkg-config static links to them, then there should not be 
an issue.

Doing this might enable pkg-config to not bundle outdated libraries as 
part of the source without requiring circular binary dependencies.