Dan Kegel wrote:
Russell Shaw wrote:
One caveat, though: the manpage says
PKG_CONFIG_PATH
A colon-separated (on Windows, semicolon-separated) list
of directories to search for .pc files. The default directory
will always be searched after searching the path;
the default is lib-dir/pkgconfig where libdir is the libdir
where pkg-config was installed.
What happens if you don't have the library in question installed
in PKG_CONFIG_PATH? pkg-config will silently search /usr/lib/pkgconfig,
and possibly grab the wrong version of the library.
If you're unlucky, the library will link, but the resulting program
won't run.
One more little reason, perhaps, to have a separate copy of pkg-config
per installed userland.
configure.ac checks the library via pkg-config, so regardless of what
library gets detected, if the autoconf check accepts the library version,
the resulting build should work. ...
If autoconf doesn't complain, the result should work. It is up to the
user to make sure the right <package>.pc file is accessed by pkg-config.
All I'm suggesting is that, when putting together a set of compilers
and userspace libraries for users, it will make their lives easier
if a copy of pkg-config is included with the compilers, so they
don't have to specify PKG_CONFIG_PATH.
Or, if you think it's better for your users to stop whining and
figure everything out for themselves, you can just let them use
the system pkg-config, even though it might silently find the
wrong package.
It's usually set up by the distro maintainers where pkg-config
looks for its .pc files, and they make sure that all dev libs
put their .pc files there. There's only confusion when you install
non distro libs into places like /usr/local. Windoze is an afterthought,
so there may still be confusion there. I don't know how well rpm
distros adhere to any standard, but debian is consistant if you
stick to debian packages.
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