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
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