On Fri, 7 Jun 2002, Tor Lillqvist wrote: > Philip Brown writes: > > You did not mention, however, why pkgconfig was suddenly added to > > gimp1.3.7, when it was not neccessary for gimp1.2.x > > Because it's there (even on Win32), it would be stupid not to use it. It also is required for gtk 2.0. > >> However, using pkg-config makes the configure.in files *less* complex.) > > really? > Yes. Before pkg-config, lots of different libraries had scripts that did the exact same thing (and most of the time shared about 99% of the code in common.) The purpose of these scripts was just to tell autoconf which arguments were needed to use a library (locations, etc.) It made sense to combine all of these foo-configs into one unified program. Before that, compiling a big program like gimp was a nightmare if you had libraries installed in any location other than /usr/lib. Autoconf only looks for libraries in a couple of locations and then gives up, unless you explicitly tell it where the libraries are. So you would have to do something horrible like: ./configure --with-libfoo=/home/notroot/lib --with-libbar=/home/notroot/lib --with-libbaz=/home/notroot/lib a tiresome, annoying, and error-prone process, especially if many libraries were involved. But the same thing with pkg-config (asumming all of the libraries are pkg-configized) is just PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/notroot/pkgconfig ./configure much much much better. We have tried very hard to make gimp easy to compile for people in somewhat unusual conditions, and pkg-config helps this immensely. Rockwalrus
