On Friday 22 October 2010, Pavol Rusnak wrote: > Hi all! > > Today I spoke with some KDE folks at the openSUSE Conference and we came > to the conclusion that it would be great if all packages where it makes > sense (mainly libraries) started to use pkg-config files. If they were
What do you mean with "use pkg-config files" ? Use pkg-config to find other software or install pkg-config files for themselves ? For using pkg-config to find other software: KDE uses cmake for building, and cmake is able to find software without the help of pkg-config. It is also a requirement for any Find-module in KDE that it can find the repsective software without the help of pkg-config. This is a simple thing to do, you just need find_program/find_library/find_path() calls and set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH accordingly. Relying on pkg-config would mean that for building KDE or some other package, you need to set at least two environment variables: CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH and the pkg-config variable. So, to make it short: using pkg-config in KDE's Find-modules is ok, but they *must* also work without pkg-config, as long as the package is installed in a standard location or CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH is set correctly. Also, our Windows-developers like the fact that we don't rely on pkg-config. For installing pkg-config files for KDE modules which install libraries: I don't have objections, but I also don't see a big benefit. Some of the KDE modules which install libraries (kdelibs, kdepimlibs, and some others) already install CMake Config.cmake files. These files are cmake-script files, which are searched and loaded by cmake when you do a find_package(Foo), then it tries to find a FooConfig.cmake e.g. in libdir/cmake/Foo/. These files are *much* more powerful than pkg-config files and can contain much more information. E.g. they can provide full dependency information, support for different configurations (e.g. a debug and a release build etc.), full versioning (i.e. installing multiple versions and find_package() will find a suitable one if installed), etc. So, while I don't have objections to installing pkg-config files, I don't see a big benefit in it, while I see major benefits with installing cmake Config.cmake files. Who should be the users of these files ? Other KDE applications or libs are best served with cmake's Config.cmake files. > in-place we would be able to create cross-distro packages with ease and > even to easily detect build requirements and autogenerate packages as well. Can you please elaborate ? If you install cmake 2.8.3 (currently in rc-phase), you also get a file FindPackageLog.txt, which lists all packages which were searched using find_package() with the required version and whether they were found or not. Alex _______________________________________________ Kde-buildsystem mailing list Kde-buildsystem@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-buildsystem
