Re: [libredwg] avoiding pkg-config

[Wookey]

+++ Thien-Thi Nguyen [2014-10-19 16:22 +0200]:
> Good news: Hydra now is able to build the tarball, and to
> successfully "make" for various platforms:
> 
>  http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/libredwg-master
> 
> The failures now come from "make check", which invokes
> pkg-config(1) to compute the flags to build program
> testsuite/xmlsuite/testsuite (from the corresponding .c) file.
> 
> There are two reasonable solutions, i think: (a) make Hydra
> aware of pkg-config; (b) avoid pkg-config altogether.  IMHO (b)
> is cleaner, since we can get the same information from program
> xml2-config(1), which is normally part of package libxml2-dev
> (on Debian, that is, YMMV), along w/ the library's headers.
> In sum, pkg-config is overkill; we don't need it.

I disagree. pkg-config is a good, reliable, generic mechanism which
also works correctly for crossbuilding and is
multiarch-compatible. Assorted foo-config scripts from various
packages (such as xml2-config) provide the same functionality in a
nonstandard (different for every package), non-cross-compatible,
multiarch-breaking (they produce gratuitous difference between
different architecture builds in dirs that should match across arches)
fashion.

So whilst this makes little difference to libredwg, there are lots of
wider reasons why pkg-config if a good thing. Packages which have
historically used foo-config scripts are slowly being updated to use
pkg-config by default. We should be doing this too, not trying to
avoid it and going in the opposite direction.

If there are problems using pkg-config for some reason (normally it is
very strightforward), I am happy to help sort those out in the
interests of improving the software.

Wookey
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