Hugh McMaster wrote:
Hi Howard,
On Sun, 24 Nov 2019 at 01:59, Howard Chu wrote:
AFAICS it is just another moving part that breaks. It doesn't provide any information. To use it you have to know whether to look in the /usr configs or /usr/local (or other places),
pkg-config automatically knows where the headers and libraries are, since information is hard-coded into the pc file. If the headers and libraries are installed in a standard system location (e.g. /usr/lib or /usr/include), this information is not passed to the command line, since the paths are already in the environment.If you have pkg-config files in a custom location (e.g. /opt), you can simply set PKG_CONFIG_PATH and you'll get -L/opt/my/custom/path -ldap -lber
It's just a different workflow.
One of the problems with detecting openldap is that developers need to know where the libraries and headers are. pkg-config handles this for you when compiling. (And yes, I'll admit developers should know this anyway.) For instance, how many people know ldap depends on lber?
If they're linking to shared libraries, they don't need to know, since libldap.so already links to liblber.so.
If we had a sane static library implementation, that included its dependency libraries in a __LIBS element (the same way ranlib stores symbol offsets in a __SYMDEF element in static libraries) then nobody would ever need to know. pkg-config is a bullshit hack that doesn't solve the root problem.
If I know to look in /usr/local to find the package config I want, then I already know that the header and lib paths I need are in /usr/local and it hasn't helped at all.
The point is that you had to know about your setup.
And pkg-config doesn't change that; I still have to know where the .pc files went.
But I don't believe it's fair to prevent people from having the option to use pkg-config support if we can offer it.
We have a project policy of not including content we can't support. And as a general circumstance, if we don't use something ourselves, then we aren't in a position to support it. Are you going to be here for the next 20+ years to support this addition?