dependancies
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
