pkg-config v0.26 released

[Daniel Macks]

On Sun, 15 May 2011 21:58:48 +0200, Tollef Fog Heen  wrote:
]] Abdoulaye Walsimou GAYE
>
> | NO pkg-config is required see its dependencies [1]
>
> No, it's not. 
>
> $ ZLIB_CFLAGS= ZLIB_LIBZ=-l ./configure --with-pcre=internal
> …
> $ make
> make[1]: Leaving directory `/tmp/glib2.0-2.28.6'
> $ pkg-config
> -bash: pkg-config: command not found
> $

Well sure, if you want a glib/gio that has no dbus support, something 
that until today would automatically be built, and with a certain pcre 
model that user might not want. You are forcing users to ned to know a 
large amount of technical details about numerous support packages 
(which can and do change) and it definitely doesn't "just work" at all 
now--defeats the whole purpose and benefit of pkg-config itself. If 
just getting pkg-config built requires so many hoops to get glib built, 
why not pull a copy of glib inside pkg-config and build it there the 
way it needs to be? It doesn't matter to me which is the "lower level" 
package, glib or pkg-config, but you just turned it upside down and 
broke it for "the other one" without documenting how to fix it. 

Also, several of the public glib .m4 macros appear to use pkg-config. 
Formerly, glib-dev could have a runtime-dependency on pkgconfig, which 
is a sane package-manager choice, since glib-dev uses pkgconfig and 
things that use glib-dev should not need to care how glib-dev works 
internally. But now that is impossible and broken, because pkgconfig 
needs a build-dependency on glib-dev. 

I'll remind that the idea of replacing/upgrading the old internal glib1 
with other glib modes was discussed for a while on this very list, and 
it appeared several were aware that "glib2 needs pkgconfig" was a 
problem that needed to be solved even if glib2 were to be pull 
internally and stripped down to bare essentials. 

Is pkg-config really that complicated that it needs a large library as 
glib, that does all sorts of cool but completely irrelevant things? Is 
"C that requires that library" the right choice to implement simple 
string-handling (breaking on whitespace, comparisons, hash/list 
collections of them)?

dan

  --
Daniel Macks
dmacks at netspace.org