pkg-config-lite

[Dan Nicholson]

On 4/2/12, Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen at err.no> wrote:
> ]] Dan Nicholson
>
>> I think you've made it clear that you don't think having the build
>> loop is an issue, but I think for plenty of users it has become an
>> issue.
>
> Yeah, it's become a larger issue than I anticipated and I think you're
> right that we should reconsider this.
>
> [...]
>
>> So, would you be open to adding a default off internal glib if I
>> maintain it? I already had it working a year or so ago and was just
>> refreshing my patches last week for the latest glib stable. Most of
>> the time it would just live in the tree collecting dust, unlike the
>> old internal glib that unpacked itself every time you ran autogen.sh.
>> The tree looked like this in my previous work:
>
> If it's default-off, I wouldn't really mind so much, no.  It then
> becomes mainly a «the download is significantly larger than it ought to
> be», but bandwidth generally isn't that much of a problem.
>
> In time, I want to move away from glib completely, since it provides so
> much more than what we're interested in.  We'd be ok with a simple set
> of linked list functions, some syntactic sugar for string handling and
> something to do the option parsing.  The latter is actually the hardest
> point, linked lists are easy enough to do ourselves.

I think the things that are used from glib and/or popt are:

* GSting - I'd really rather not go back to managing strings manually.

* GHashTable - We can obviously roll our own hash table, but it's a
lot nicer to lean on someone else for the dirty work.

* GSList - Same as GHashTable.

* poptParseArgvString/g_shell_parse_argv - Converts the Cflags/Libs
command lines into argument vectors with all the quoting/escaping
magic. I'd rather not rewrite that code.

* poptOption/GOption - We could convert to getopt eventually, although
these guys do have some nice sugar.

So, it's doable, but it could be in for some bumpy waters while corner
cases come to light.

> So, feel free to commit.

OK, I'll get something in later this week that uses the latest glib
stable release and ping people to test it out. How do you feel about
the no-popt patchset?

--
Dan