Re: [bug-libunistring] pkg-config support, please

[Jim Meyering]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 6:52 AM, Daiki Ueno <address@hidden> wrote:
> Tim Ruehsen <address@hidden> 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