Re: bdw-gc dependency

[Reuben Thomas]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2023 at 14:24, Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:

There are three problems here:

1) Since I don't want to install pkg-config on my build machines, I opt
for the environment variables approach. I have already set BDW_GC_CFLAGS
and BDW_GC_LIBS for the sake of GNU guile and GNU poke. Now GNU a2ps
comes along and wants me to set *other* environment variables for the
*same* purpose.

A code search on codesearch.debian.net shows that
  - 2 GNU packages (guile and poke) use
      PKG_CHECK_MODULES([BDW_GC], ...
      or PKG_CHECK_MODULES(BDW_GC, ...
  - 3 non-GNU packages (mmv, ocp, libsidplayfp) use
      PKG_CHECK_MODULES([LIBGC], ...
      or PKG_CHECK_MODULES(LIBGC, ...

Please join the camp of guile and poke, and thus avoid unnecessary work
for the one who installs the package!

Done. As it happens, I'm also upstream for mmv, so I've made the change to its sources too!

(It was a fairly narrow thing in terms of historical precedence, though: GNU Zile used LIBGC from 2011 (until its recent rewrite in Vala), and was just beaten by Guile, which was used BDW_GC since 2010!)

3) The pkg.m4 that you used for creating the tarball mishandles empty
environment variables. When I set
  export LIBGC_CFLAGS=
  export LIBGC_LIBS="-lgc"
the configure test bails out and aborts. Whereas when I set
  export LIBGC_CFLAGS="-Wall"
  export LIBGC_LIBS="-lgc"
the configure test succeeds and I can build the package.

Suggested fix: Pull the pkg.m4 from GNU poke 3.0 (which you find on
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/poke/). AFAIK version 0.29.2 is the newest one.

Oops, I had an old version installed in my user's home directory. I've cleaned it out, and the next release should use my system-installed 0.29.2.

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