[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] directfb -> pkg-config

[Rich Felker]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 06:19:00PM +0100, joerg at britannica.bec.de wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 09:35:40PM -0500, Rich Felker wrote:
> > Seriously, this all worked fine for the past 7 years or so before
> > there was such a thing as pkg-config. pkg-config is yet another case
> > of overengineering and inventing a solution to a nonexistant problem,
> > or rather inventing the problem itself, which seems to be a common
> > mistake of GNU/Linux these days and leads to endless bloat...
> 
> Sorry Rich, but this is ignored. Just look at the checks necessary to
> get statically linked SDL, SSL or Kerberos to work and you would know
> that it didn't work fine.

This is because static SDL and Kerberos are incorrectly built. If they
need numerous other libraries which the caller is not supposed to know
about, these libraries should be _included_ in libSDL.a.

Anyway, SDL is horribly broken to begin with and should not be used.
I've heard similar about Kerberos but I've also heard that some modern
versions of it are not-so-broken in the area of security.

> pkg-config is a *huge* improvement for many libraries with larger
> dependency list and makes writing portable configure scripts a lot
> easier. I don't like the "reference" implementation, but that is a
> completely separate issue.

pkg-config is bad because it encourages people to make crap that's
difficult to link correctly against. Before pkg-config, it was so
difficult to link against such crap that no one would use it if you
released such a monstrosity. Now it's the norm for GUI bloatware.

> As a side note, the suggested "fake" pkg-config can be as simple
> matching the various existing include dir / library dir options with the
> target package name and emulation --cflags and --libs. That would make
> the OP happy, it would mean that a lot options can be deprecated etc.

OK, so you're saying that we would still test that compiling/linking
against the library works, even after running pkg-config? That's
probably ok.

Rich