Re: Libtool and Pkg-Config

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr 22, 2001, Eric Lemings <address@hidden> wrote:

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

Which is exactly the wrong approach.  A package should never, ever
install anything outside the --prefix/--exec-prefix/--*dir specified
by the user.  Having stuff stuffed :-) into pkg-config's data
directories will just make it impossible to reasonably pick one out of
multiple installed versions of the same package.  Please don't do
that.

>> 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'm not talking about installing packages in the same prefix.  I'm
talking about installing each version in a separate prefix, so that I
can easily switch between them.

> 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.

What exactly do you need from the .la files?  In what sense would
pkg-config be any better than the search libtool 1.4 does for .la
files in the default and user-specified library search directories?
I.e., what's the point of introducing yet another tool?

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  address@hidden, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        address@hidden, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me