Re: cross-compilation and proprietary pkg-config replacements (pcre-config, pcap-config, etc)

[Mike Frysinger]

On Sat 16 Aug 2014 00:21:02 Wookey wrote:
> +++ John Spencer [2014-08-15 23:49 +0200]:
> > It seems it's "en vogue" for libs to ship their own broken
> > replacement rather than supplying a portable pkgconfig file...
> > the list is big, but these here are the most often used ones:
> > pcap-config, pcre-config, freetype-config, apr-1-config,
> > glib-config, gtk-config, ncursesw5-config, libmikmod-config, etc.
> 
> It's not really "en vogue", it's historic: many of the things that
> have their own *-config scripts are sufficiently old that they
> pre-date pkg-config so are not doing this just to be annoying. At the
> time they didn't have much choice.

at least with some, it's not just a matter of just compile flags.  the apr 
ones to mind as a complete mess as they use the paths to indirectly look up a 
bunch of other things (like use the install libtool linker script).  simply 
dropping in a .pc file there isn't sufficient to clean up the mess :(.

> > since it's unlikely to get any of those fixed in the next decade (or
> > even convinced to ship .pc files instead of their NIH'd pkg-config
> > replacement),
> 
> I don't see why this should be too hard. We've (Debian) already
> persuaded a couple of projects to just use pkg-config instead of
> whatever homegrown stuff they had, or at least do that as well. It's
> the right way to make crossing and multiarch work right (as you are
> aware), and I'd hope that most upstreams could be persuaded of that.

the gpg guys are the only ones that come to mind as actively ignoring and 
blocking progress.  i too have had good experience with just about every other 
project.
-mike

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