pkg-config2

[Sean Middleditch]

On Sat, 2005-01-22 at 22:53 -0500, Maks Orlovich wrote:
> On Saturday 22 January 2005 10:46 pm, Daniel Stone wrote:
> > I strongly believe that kde-config should not exist, and that it should be
> > a function of pkg-config.
> 
> Probably because you don't know what it does. Actually, there is no overlap in 
> functionality.

Probably because you don't know what pkg-config does.  ;-)  Looking at
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/other/kde-config.html I see
absolutely *nothing* that kde-config that pkg-config cannot.

pkg-config allows you to provide a list of key values with a library.
kde-config is a tool to query a number of particular keys.  It has a
complex interface to those keys (several different command options that
alter the meaning of the requested key) but it's still just a key/value
lookup tool.

kde-config is just a tool that does what pkg-config does, but does it
with a different command-line syntax.  Whether kde-config's syntax is in
any way better is another story; certainly pkg-config could be "fixed"
if it is decided that kde-config has a cleaner syntax for the desired
operations.  (I especially like the differentiation between "all
available paths" and "preferred install path" that kde-config exposes.)