On 2014-06-17 at 12:36 -0700 Howard Chu sent off:
If you're depending on some unknown OpenLDAP install to provide all of the features that your Samba package needs, you need more than luck. You need to know that it was built against a compatible Kerberos library, a sane Cyrus SASL version, and a working crypto library. The only way to know that is to build it yourself against valid packages, in which case, you don't need to go grubbing through the system looking for them.
many people are happy with their own installation of openldap or whatever package. Also I know what we have to check for to have a sufficient ldap implementation for our Samba builds, believe me :-)
If you're depending on some OpenLDAP that was packaged by someone else, then you should be asking them to provide a pkg-config file for their package. Installation issues are strictly not our concern, we distribute source code. That should have already been clear from http://www.openldap.org/its/index.cgi/Archive.Build?id=5184 Followup
okay, I didn't explicitly write that I disagree. I disgree on that statement by the way :-)
usually package maintainers don't write .pc files they install the .pc files that the source code ships. We also ship .pc files for all of our libraries we ship in Samba. "make install" puts in the right content.
Even if we provided a .pc file, you still have to guess where *that* got installed - was it in /usr, or in /usr/local, or somewhere else?
to get the location of the pkg-config file is really the smallest pain.
I've certainly never seen pkg-config as a standard component of AIX or Solaris.
What difference does it make here if pkg-config is a *standard* component or if it has to be separately installed?
Is pkg-config even supported on AIX?
it is, google "pkg-config aix" shows you.
To have a pkg-config files is something openldap *benefits* from because it ensures that people can build agains openldap without big trouble. I'm not sure if you really see how much benefit openldap gets out of those trivial to generate .pc files actually. If people are able to build against mozldap because just because there is a simple .pc file which sets the compile and link flags right, then mozldap might become their prefered library in the future. It's up to you if you want to make it easy or hard for people to use your software.
Cheers Björn