(discussion about how to get the compile/link flags out of gnustep-make) > That's the kind of functionality we need and a usage style familiar to users > of pkg-config (and convenient for use with the autoconf macros). Another > option is to just use pkg-config and bundle it with gnustep-make so > that the gnustep-make installation process guarantees the presence of > pgk-config, installing it if necessary.
pkg-config works best if compile/link flags are fixed and listed in a file. The compile/link flags in gnustep-make are determined dynamically instead, they are not fixed. You can have non-flattened multi-platform installations that are mounted from the network; the same gnustep-make will then use different compilation flags/tools for the different hosts (keep in mind that each host might also have a different filesystem configuration, eg, they could be sharing a network-mounted System domain, while having different domains in different locations). Or, more commonly, even in a flattened system, each user can organize their own user domain however they want, and control it via the GNUstep user config file (that's great for testing various versions of your own GNUstep lib/app without messing up your system). So, every user should get a different list of -I and -L flags to lookup things in their user domain - in whatever way it is currently configured in their user config file. That's for the general flags to compile/link a tool or an application, which are the only ones which are not trivial; all the other flags are trivial (that is, -llibrary to link against library) and to get them you don't need pkg-config and you don't need gnustep-make. The easier way to have gnustep-config output the right flags that you should use for compiling/linking a tool against gnustep-base/gnustep-gui seems to be to have gnustep-config do a quick gnustep-make run in the background asking it to determine the right flags, and return them. That's my current plan. I don't see any easy solution with pkg-config unless we rewrite large parts of gnustep-make. If the syntax of gnustep-config is reasonably similar to the pkg-config one, there shouldn't be much difference though. :-) Thanks PS: Building a bundle or a framework (or even an app) will always be very troublesome without gnustep-make because it's not just a matter of a couple of compile/link flags. I think what we hope to achieve is something more limited, which is that you can easily get the flags to compile an ObjC file and to link a program against gnustep-base and gnustep-gui. _______________________________________________ Gnustep-dev mailing list Gnustep-dev@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustep-dev