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

[Daiki Ueno]

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.

Regards,
--
Daiki Ueno