Hi all, I'm trying to package an application which uses some libraries using the pkg-config system to automatically setup the compilation and linking flags (namely the ffmpeg libraries). The pkg-config system is also useful because it lets you specify easily some constraints checking the version of the library installed, e.g.: pkg-config --atleast-version=51.0.1 libavformat I'm using pkg-config to determine the extralibs required to compile and link my application. The only thing the user has to care about in this case is to have the .pc (pkg-config) files in the right directory looked up by pkg-config, which can be eventually customized setting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable. The drawback of the pkg-config approach is that it highly relies on its own database of PC files, if the user mangles it (for example manually removing some library/header file) then a pkg-config query will report no problem but the application won't link/compile. On the other hand the AC_CHECK_LIB and AC_CHECK_HEADERS looks in the standard dirs for both libs and headers (eventually customized setting the LD_FLAGS and CPPFLAGS dirs), so it verifies the actual presence and usability of the various libraries/headers, but can't check for example for the version of the libraries detected, which can be easily be performed by pkg-config --modversion=X.Y.Z libfoo. A possible solution could be to use both pkg-config to perform version/presence queries and the autoconf macros to verify their effective usability, but this turns out to be messy, since if the user happens to have libraries/headers in some path specified by LD_FLAGS and CPPFLAGS and she doesn't specify a corresponding PKG_CONFIG_PATH then there will be a mismatch between the informations reported by the autoconf macros. For example: the user may customize the LD_FLAGS and CPPFLAGS so that they point to some directory where she installed the required libraries which are checked by the autoconf macros, when the .pc file checked by pkg-config may refer to some already installed system libs. A solution could be then to write a little test program to run during configuration which uses the flags provided by pkg-config (I wonder if there is already some macro which can do it in autoconf). So my (very general) question is: which is the right approach to integrate autoconf and pkg-config? I hope to have expressed clearly the problem, sorry for the very likely misunderstanding I'm eventually showing about autoconf/pkg-config. Many thanks in advance for any suggestion/idea. Regards. -- Stefano Sabatini Linux user number 337176 (see http://counter.li.org) _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
