[article] trimming down autoconf's configure scripts by using pkg-config

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Rogelio Serrano <rogelio.serrano at gmail.com> schrieb:

<snip>

> Maybe a declarative language that is easier to work with when it 
> breaks while porting to other platforms. M4 gives me migraines. 

Better an purely descriptive model, without complex logic.

I'm currently working on that with several X.org packages.

If you like, I could post my buildfiles.


<snip>

> And I dont have perl on my system. And i dont understand libtool at all.

Libtool is misdesign. No stable interface.

I've started an completely different approach:

    http://wiki.metux.de/public/Universal_Toolchain
    
It provides an simple but robust interface for all toolchain commands.
The command line interface is completely platform independent and 
also handles situations like crosscompiling and sysroot'ing.

Of course it has to be ported to each platform of interest, too.
But once it has been done, a simple makefile calling this unitool 
should also work for most cases.

<snip>

> I can actually live with a very simple c program that can probe for a
> particular feature. I have even tried a builder that comes as c source
> code that you build first. You dont even need make at all.

Why always probing ? 

Why can't we just have one central database (per target system), 
which contains such target dependent information and certain os 
features with their necessary build flags as virtual packages ?

For example string-functions:

On some platforms they're broken and certain packages ship their 
own replacement. This is redundant. An simple wrapper package 
representing these functions and providing necessary fixes, 
options, etc could make this all obsolte. The application just
imports this package and the rest is done automatically.


cu
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