Re: Libtool and Pkg-Config

[Havoc Pennington]

Alexandre Oliva <address@hidden> writes:
> On Apr 22, 2001, Havoc Pennington <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > pkg-config has some intelligence, i.e. if you request two libs at once
> > it will nuke duplicate flags and order the -l flags properly.
> 
> Err...  It won't always remove duplicate -l flags, will it?  This
> isn't always correct.

It does. The tool does not understand how to create a portable link
line; this is why we're having this conversation. ;-)

> > Also, it can gripe about missing dependencies or conflicting
> > libraries.
> 
> Good.

Note this means something different from libtool; it means
dependencies/conflicts specified by the library author in the .pc
file, not dependencies/conflicts deduced by libtool.

So e.g. I can make GTK 1.3.3 require GLib 1.3.3 even though they could
have the same soname. i.e. they are binary compatible but QA is
simpler if these are locked together, or something. Just a
hypothetical example.

> > I think for libtool it's as simple as having a concept of a "package"
> > in addition to a concept of a library, so we can pass "gtk+-2.0" to
> > libtool instead of "-L/home/hp/unst/lib -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lgtk-x11-1.3
> > -lgdk-x11-1.3 -lXext -lgdk_pixbuf-1.3 -lm -lpangox -lX11 -lpango
> > -lgobject-1.3 -lgmodule-1.3 -ldl -lglib-1.3"
> 
> Well, you can already create a dummy libtool library that will be
> replaced with all of this when it's linked in.  In fact,
> gtk-x11-1.3.la may be that (no longer dummy) library.

Right, the .la file is somewhat equivalent.

> > Then the remaining thing to add is the RPM-style version comparisons,
> > which is beyond my ability to implement in shell, but I'm sure someone
> > can figure it out. ;-)
> 
> In shell?  I was hoping pkg-config could be implemented in something
> more reasonable...
> 

pkg-config is in C, that's why I finished writing it. ;-) I have no
hope of patching libtool in any significant way, my /bin/sh skills are
quite limited.

Havoc