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

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Miles Bader <miles.bader at necel.com> wrote:

> 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.

Well, yes and no. From the application's view, the OS / platform
these clean interfaces, but in fact, it's an wrapper sitting between
both and presenting itself as an (pkgconfig-) package to the 
application. To the application, its completely irrelevant what's 
inside it, just that it provides the clean interfaces matters.

> 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.

In other words: in ten years lets talk about it again ?

No, that's absolutely dissatisfying.


Carrying around the bugs of the history is not an option for me,
at least if fixing them is so easy.

What is so hard in expecting people to have such an widely adopted
tool like pkg-config installed, if we're already expecting so many
other tools, ie. bash, gcc, make, m4, autotools, ... ?

What is so hard in expecting people to have an simple small library
called 'stdc-string' installed, if we need cleanly working stdc string
handling functions, if we have so many other dependencies ?

Is it better, easier, more productive, to have dozens of workarounds
in every package by its own instead of solving these problems in one
package once and for all ?


cu
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