Re: [libredwg] avoiding pkg-config

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

() Piyush Parkash <address@hidden>
() Mon, 20 Oct 2014 23:51:55 +0530

   Is there a way to compile on make check?

Yes, in fact the current testsuite/xmlsuite/Makefile.am
already has the correct formulation:

 check_PROGRAMS = testsuite

This snippet means "make" does not build program ‘testsuite’
(from testsuite.c), but "make check" does, prior to running
the tests defined in makefile var ‘TESTS’.

So, no worries; all is well on that count.

The problematic part is this:

 LIBXML = `pkg-config libxml-2.0 --cflags`

This is problematic for two reasons: (a) the variable name
‘LIBXML’ is not descriptive of the variable's value, namely
compiler flags particular to libxml; (b) using backticks to
find those flags at "make check" time is inefficient should
there be more than one program that needs to link against
libxml.  Admittedly, (b) is a potential concern and not an
immediate one (hence in my patch i retained their usage),
but since we are doing proper long-term thinking (evidenced
by going w/ pkg-config over foo-config), we might as well
avoid planting in the first place a minor convenience that
will only grow into a problem (to be re-fixed) in the future.

Rather than fully explain now what i meant by:

 the pkg-config(1) invocation should anyway be moved from
 "make check" time to configure.ac.

i will post a patch shortly that should make things concretely
clear (and if not, that's more room for improvement :-D).  At
the moment, i await resolution of:

 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/hydra-users/2014-10/msg00001.html

so that i can simply add ‘pkgconfig’ to ‘vdeps’.  Hydra
(actually Nix) syntax is still somewhat strange to me...

   I can do this or I can make testsuite independent?

I think only a small bit of the Makefile.am needs to change;
let's leave the rest alone -- "if it works, don't fix it!"

-- 
Thien-Thi Nguyen
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