[gnutls-dev] Re: pkg-config support for opencdk

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2006-08-07 Simon Josefsson <jas at extundo.com> wrote:
> Andreas Metzler <ametzler at downhill.at.eu.org> writes:
> > attached a simple patch for adding pkg-config support to opencdk.
> > cu andreas
[...]
> Hi, I took your e-mail as a suggestion to implement this, and have
> installed this in CVS now.

Splendid. Thank you.

> Btw, I'd recommend people to use standard autoconf-mechanisms to find
> opencdk,

I did provide this as the current *m4 tests shipped in the gnutls
software are problematic. They use foo-config to get the needed
dependency libs and CFLAGS and foo-config is not smart enough. For
example libgnutls-config --libs generates this output:

-L/usr/lib -lgnutls -L/usr/lib -ltasn1 -lgcrypt -lgpg-error

However on many systems (Linux, the Hurd, ...) it is not necessary to
link indirect dependencies when doing symbolic linking. i.e. if you use
gnutls-functions this will be enough
gcc -lgnutls -o foo foo.c
there is no need to link against -ltasn1 -lgcrypt -lgpg-error, the
symbolic linker will handle these just fine at run-time.

This unnecessary linkage hurts us (Debian), because dependency cycles
get a lot bigger than necessary. The greater part of gnome will link
against libtasn although only gnutls functions are used, and if tasn
changes its soname we will need to rebuild a 100 times the packages
than actually necessary (and until that has happened the yet
not-rebuilt ones link against two versions of libtasn).

pkg-config can solve this problem because knowledge about whether
direct linking of dependency libs is necessary is built in,
the output of "pkg-config --libs gnutls" differs in between "broken"
and other systems.

> because pkg-config doesn't work for cross-compilation,

I actually do not know whether this is true, i.e. whether
pkg-config --libs foo
will work in scenarios where
foo-config --libs
works. I fail to come up with such a szenario at short time however,
and googling seems to suggest that crosscompilation of pkg-config
using software is possible.

> and it also breaks the standard autoconf-approach of testing for
> features.

You can use pkg-config to find the library and then use the standard
tests. I am just arguing that pkg-config might do a better job than the
foo-config scripts.

thanks for listening, cu andreas
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