On 17 Jul 2006, at 14:03, Daniël Mantione wrote:
There's nothing C-specific about libraries, nor about the *config
scripts. At
most it would be linker-specific.
There is, those scripts mainly exist because a C compiler cannot
determine
the dependencies of a library. I.e. if you like libgtk you must
also link
libglib.
We don't need this in Pascal, the compiler can perfectly determine the
dependencies by checking the used units. So the primary reason for
this
cruft is void in Pascal.
You could support exactly the same in C with some #pragma statements
in the header files. This is implementation-specific rather than
language specific.
A library also exist in at least multiple locations, versions (both
ABI-compatible and -incompatible with previous versions) and
implementations
(e.g. a native Mac OS X GTK and an X-based one).
I don't see how *_config guards you against this:
* In case of a version change it will simply return the new
version. The
.so symlink does this as well. If the new version is incompatible
with
the old one, bad luck.
But if the new version has additional (or different) dependencies or
library names, everything will remain fine with the script (as e.g.
with the FreeBSD problem which started this discussion). It's the
same with different implementations which maybe be ABI- and API-
compatible, but have different dependencies.
It helps for locations, but we already have a well adequate
solution for
that: Putting the location in fpc.cfg.
Of course you can require the user to manually specify everything in
his config file or on the command line, but it's nicer if this can be
avoided.
Jonas_______________________________________________
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