On 17 Jul 2006, at 14:57, Daniël Mantione wrote:
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).
That is exactly what Marco's code solves, in a generic way. Solving
it by
parsing gtk-config, tclConfig.sh, and so on is a work that never
finishes.
As I said, you do not have to parse that unless you have an internal
linker. And even then you only have to parse linker options for the
platforms you support. Also, depending on which gtk you link against
on Mac OS X you may need to link umpteen gtk/gdk libraries, or need a
"-framework Gtk+-Cocoa" or similar linker switch (which would be
hard to support with Marco's approach).
The whole point of the *config scripts it that you do not have to
care about such implementation details at all.
It's the same with different
implementations which maybe be ABI- and API-compatible, but have
different
dependencies.
Solve it using Pascal:
{$ifdef platform}
uses library;
{$endif}
.... and the compiler will sort out the rest.
As explained above, a single platform may have multiple
implementations available. You can of course generate three versions
of all gtk units for Mac OS X (or even four by now), but that's not
really nice either.
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.
If there was a generic way determining library locations: yes
gtk-config can only be used to determine the location of one
library: libgtk. It is useless for libtcl, for example.
It's not just gtk which uses this, at east sdl also does. And the
fact that it doesn't solve world hunger does not mean it's not useful
to support it.
Still, you can put some autodetections in samplecfg, but the compiler
itself is really the wrong location to do so.
samplecfg only works at install time of the compiler, which is the
wrong time. People don't decide at install time which package, which
variant and which version of it they will want to use one day.
The compiler or linker is the only right place to do it (unless you
wrap the whole thing with a configure script and Makefiles, in which
case you can do it there -- but our compiler largely replaces exactly
that).
Jonas_______________________________________________
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