glib dependancy in KDE3.x

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 12:34:16PM -0500, George Staikos wrote: 
>    Well days after my two hour nightmare of trying to get it to work, I can't 
> remember my problems with it anymore, but I can tell you it was far short of 
> zero-pain.  I had to set environment variables to point to files that 
> sometimes did and sometimes did not get installed by the various libraries, 
> and in some cases I had to go an reinstall libraries that I had already 
> installed without pkg-config.  I don't want to imagine what this is like on 
> non-Linux systems.  I think this thing needs to "cook" a little while before 
> KDE starts using it.
>  

What libs were you using it with? Some libs get it a bit wrong
perhaps. If a lib doesn't install .pc files if pkg-config isn't found
at build time, that's just a bug in the lib's build. GLib certainly
does not do that. You can't blame something like that on the
pkg-config tool.

You have to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH if you install a lib in a different
prefix from pkg-config itself, but this is documented in the man page
and works just like LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PATH, and so forth which
presumably already have to be set when using nondefault prefixes.

libxml, libpng, Xft, fontconfig, etc. are all using pkg-config, in
addition to GNOME.

The main issue with pkg-config is that it should be merged with
libtool somehow to create Grand Unified Library Tool, but I'm not
holding my breath. ;-)

pkg-config is not a complicated thing, it is just a cleanup for all
those ad hoc *-config scripts. (I have 46 of the stupid things in my
/usr/bin/, and most aren't from GNOME... it's kind of ridiculous.)

Havoc