Re: TODO

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Scott James Remnant wrote on Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 04:43:48PM CET:
> On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 14:24 +0000, Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> 
> > 6.  Absorb the functionality of the aberration called pkg-config.  Libtool
> >     already has all the information it needs, we just need to teach it (or
> >     maybe a subsidiary script) to spit out link flags after poking around
> >     in a dependency chain of .la files.
> > 
> There's actually a couple of things pkg-config does that Libtool doesn't
> currently do.  pkg-config's main job can be summed up simply as enabling
> parallel-installed -dev packages.
> 
> Principally it provides the right -L and -l flags to link libraries, we
> can get this from Libtool.  An an improvement would then be only
> providing the dependency -l flags on platforms that need it, and not on
> Linux for example.

I've so far been unaware of the reason why libtool does not set
link_all_deplibs to `no' on linux, as you put in the Debian package.
Can anybody point me to a reason/docs/thread explaining this?

> However it *also* provides the right -I flags to point at the include
> files.  A GTK+ application will '#include <gtk/gtkbutton.h>' for example
> and require -I/usr/include/gtk-2.0 to actually be able to find that (or
> -1.0, -3.0, etc.)

That's a good feature.  Dunno whether I want that (or it can even be) in
a .la file or not.  But letting libtool output both information might
prove valuable.  Absorbing pkgconfig in libtool in a way that each
pkgconfig user must use libtool will pave way for quote some resistance,
I'd expect.

Regards,
Ralf