On Feb 11, 2007, at 3:30 PM, Alex Perez wrote:
there are clear advantages...
now I can add stuff to configure for things *using* gnustep-make
which attempts to see if
GNUstep libraries exist.
there could be a way to bootstrap gnustep-make to "just work"
without any gnustep specific
environment variables.
Those are not advantages of pkg-config. Those are examples of where
the use of pkg-config would provide the same functionality. Early on
in this thread Nicola suggested both gnustep-config.sh and the use of
a makefile fragment as ways of doing the same thing, so pkg-config
provides no advantage in this respect.
They advantages in that many other people already know how the hell
they work, and pretty much any newcomer does NOT know how this other
funky system we invented works; even if it's very simple, this RAISES
the barrier to entry. It does not lower it. This is why the whole
dependency argument isn't as critical as some of us seem to believe it
is.
That is not an advantage in this case. pkg-config main reason for being
is to help find compile and link flags for linking in other libraries.
It can be extended, which Matt has suggested in this case. But the
extension here is just to FIND the GNUstep makefiles - and now we are
just back were we started - the newcomer still has to learn how to use
our 'funky' makefile system.
The thing that various people have been arguing about here is, 'how do
we find out various bits of meta-data about the GNUstep system?'.
pkg-config is woefully inadequate for this work and doesn't even come
close to covering other requirements of the make system, like compiling
and linking in bundles, frameworks, palettes, etc.