glib dependancy in KDE3.x

[George Staikos]

On Saturday 08 March 2003 03:03, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.

  glib was the main one.  I had to install glib, pango, atk, gtk+ (from 
memory) to get swfdec to install.  It took hours, and the compiling itself 
was only minutes of that. 

> 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.

  This was not the case.  I had to set PKG_CONFIG_PATH even though I installed 
in the same place.  Perhaps something else locally was to blame.  I ended up 
wiping everything out and reinstalling 3 times before it worked.

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

   Of course I have all of those installed without pkg-config.  If I install 
pkg-config, do I have to reinstall all of these things, or write my own .pc 
for them?

> 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.)

   Fair enough..  but it has to work well on all the platforms we use if we 
are to use it. Working well means that it can be installed at a later date 
and not require the user to reinstall all his libraries.  There's no point in 
supporting pkg-config and traditional methods simultaneously either, imho.  
At that point we've defeated the purpose of pkg-config.

-- 

George Staikos