Re: Libtool and Pkg-Config

[Eric Lemings]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:

> On Apr 22, 2001, Eric Lemings <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> > It works the same more or less.  New Autoconf macros that use pkg-config
> > look for it in the current path and it looks for data on installed
> > libraries in its data directory.
>
> And how are packages going to register their own data into pkg-config?

Currently, they just install their .pc file into pkg-config's data directory.

> And how about maintaining multiple versions of the same package
> installed?

Currently, compatible versions simply overwrite previous versions.
Incompatible versions use the new version number as part of their name to
distinquish one from the other.

>  I could do it with the current scheme, and tweaking PATH
> is all it takes for me to choose which one a certain package will
> find.  I don't see how you'd accomplish that with a single pkg-config.

I'll agree that storing all the data in one directory has its limitations.
Still pkg-config has some options to do various checks on version numbers.  I
think everyone would agree that the tool is far from perfect.  Probably why
it's only at version 0.5.

I was thinking that if the data maintained by pkg-config could somehow be
added to the .la files and libtool could keep track (a registry perhaps) of
installed .la files, that would just about cover everything that pkg-config
currently does.  Some of this data is already in the .la files I believe.

Eric.