+++ 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 -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/
