On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 06:02:07PM -0500, James McCoy wrote: > http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Oct-20.html had some strong words > to say about using pkg.m4. Are those concerns still valid? Should > pkg.m4's macros be recommended or simply AC_PATH_TOOL?
That blog post looks like a misinformed user to me. The shell way he recommends breaks cross compilation. I've never encountered the issue of aclocal not substituting PKG_CHECK_MODULES as pkg.m4 is on the search path once you install pkg-config. On Debian system you practically cannot encounter the issue (as you will have pkg-config installed anyway to use it). For other distributions, many source packages embed (outdated) copies of pkg.m4. This is not great, but works. In any case, using AC_PATH_TOOL fixes cross compilation. Just refrain from using bare pkg-config. Helmut