On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 6:52 AM, Daiki Ueno <[email protected]> wrote: > Tim Ruehsen <[email protected]> writes: > >> Despite the criticisms, you simply give project maintainers an *option* to >> use >> pkg-config. When you add the patch, nothing changes to existing projects. And >> project maintainers who use libunistring can simply decide if they want to >> use >> pkg-config or not. >> Nothing changes for project libunistring maintainers. See it as an extended >> service for people who use libunistring. > > I know, but it is also a library's choice to encourage a standard way to > detect the library by NOT supporting other ways. > > As a new maintainer recently inherited the project, I'd like to follow > the existing direction if any (in this case, what Bruno would say). > > In other context, he pointed that pkg-config is not very good at > cross-compiling: > http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gettext.git/tree/gnulib-local/m4/libxml.m4#n36 > and it still seems to be the case. One would need to maintain a > separate pkg-config database per target platform. > >> We introduced pkg-config to Wget a while ago because distribution maintainers >> asked for it. They said, it would make their life much easier. > > But it could make other developers' life difficult. As Werner says, > pkg-config is not standardized and it is not available in some cases, > even though it is de-facto. > >>> By the way, for your use-case, perhaps libunistring.m4 in Gnulib might >>> help. It looks self-contained and you could just copy it into the m4 >>> directory and call gl_LIBUNISTRING from configure.ac: >>> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/tree/m4/libunistring.m4 >> >> Thank you to point this out. >> Of course I would like to offer a consistent way to change library and >> include >> paths for all libraries that my project uses. How can I explain that changing >> these for libunistring is completely different than for other libraries (that >> support pkg-config) ? > > There are several other libraries which choose that way: > > $ grep AM_ /usr/share/aclocal/*.m4 | grep DEFUN > > and I think it's sometimes more flexible than pkg-config, like this > case.
Daiki, I really appreciate the work you are doing, and the well-reasoned explanation for why many of us prefer not to rely on pkg-config. Thank you, Jim
