[article] trimming down autoconf's configure scripts by using pkg-config

[Miles Bader]

Alan Coopersmith <Alan.Coopersmith at Sun.COM> writes:
> So this seems to be advocating going back to the Imake model of having
> to maintain per-OS lists of what works and doesn't, which is a huge pain
> in the world of hundreds of distros with their own quirks, and a large
> part of the reason Imake was dumped in favor of using autoconf to just

Yes.

However creaky autoconf is, the imake approach sucks even more.

The "article"'s recommended approach is slightly different, but depends
greatly on every supported OS and package cooperating, which simply
isn't going to happen tomorrow.

It certainly makes sense for autoconf to have good pkg-config support,
and using it where available.  Thus if in the future pkg-config is much
more widely used than it is now, many configure files will end up being
simply a list of queries to pkg-config.  At that point, maybe autoconf
itself could be simplied to reflect the reality.  But not sooner.

-Miles
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