Hi gobolinux-devel, I recently submitted a bug report regarding PKG_CONFIG_PATH in Rootless. I'm forwarding the bug report to the devel list to facilitate greater discussion.
You can see the original bug report here: http://bugs.gobolinux.org/view.php?id=144 I think Rootless can set PKG_CONFIG_PATH to a more useful value than it currently does. At present, Rootless (in StartRootless) sets PKG_CONFIG_PATH to: export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${goboPrefix}/System/Links/Libraries/pkgconfig${PKG_CONF\ IG_PATH:+:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH} This is correct as long as Pkgconfig is not installed inside Rootless. If you install Pkgconfig inside of Rootless, you start to run into problems. StartRootless (in Pkgconfig's Environment file) will now overwrite (and forget) any previous value of PKG_CONFIG_PATH with: export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$goboLibraries/pkgconfig StartRootless will then prepend ${goboPrefix}/System/Links/Libraries/pkgconfig to PKG_CONFIG_PATH as above. The result? (On my system:) PKG_CONFIG_PATH=\ /home/gobo/System/Links/Libraries/pkgconfig:\ /home/gobo/System/Links/Libraries/pkgconfig Not only is this redundant, but .pc files provided by the host system will no longer be found! According to 'man pkg-config': PKG_CONFIG_PATH A colon-separated (on Windows, semicolon-separated) list of directories to search for .pc files. The default directory will always be searched after searching the path; the default is lib- dir/pkgconfig:datadir/pkgconfig where libdir is the libdir where pkg-config and datadir is the datadir where pkg-config was installed. Pkgconfig (inside Rootless) was installed to (in my case) PREFIX=/home/gobo/Programs/Pkgconfig/<version>. This means Pkgconfig will not search the host system's default directories for .pc files. According to strace, on my system the default directories are: /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/i486-linux-gnu /usr/local/share/pkgconfig /usr/lib/pkgconfig /usr/lib/pkgconfig/i486-linux-gnu /usr/share/pkgconfig So, when I try to use Rootless (on Ubuntu) to compile and install a recent version of GNU Backgammon (for instance), Pkgconfig will not be able to find the many Ubuntu installed development files that GNU Backgammon depends on. (Unless, of course, I manually fix the broken PKG_CONFIG_PATH.) My initial proposal for fixing this problem was to update Pkgconfig's Environment file so that it would be Rootless aware. (My proposed Envirnoment file is attached to the bug report, if you care to see it.) Hisham was hesitant to accept my proposal as there are other Programs that might similarly benefit from Rootless-speciaized Environments, so potentially many Recipes might become more complex. I then proposed (in the bug report, and now here) that, if you don't want to make the Recipes more complicated, you could achieve the same effect by setting PKG_CONFIG_PATH correctly inside StartRootless itself. This would centralize all the Rootless specialized behavior in one location, and, moreover, that location that would not interfere with GoboLinux proper. This is a little tricky, but very possible. If the directory Programs/Pkgconfig exists, StartRootless simply has to remember the original value of PKG_CONFIG_PATH and then allow Pkgconfig's Environment file to clobber PKG_CONFIG_PATH. Finally, StartRootless would reset PKG_CONFIG_PATH to a correct value. A correct value would be something like: export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=\ ${goboPrefix}/System/Links/Libraries/pkgconfig:\ ${ORIGINAL_PKG_CONFIG_PATH:+$ORIGINAL_PKG_CONFIG_PATH:}\ /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:\ /usr/local/share/pkgconfig:\ /usr/lib/pkgconfig:\ /usr/share/pkgconfig In the above, I am making a reasonable guess as to what the default directories will be for the host system's pkg-config. If there is a better way of determining the host system's default directories, I'm all for using it. I just don't know what it might be. So, to summarize, I'm proposing that Rootless be improved to automatically facilitate the Compiling of Programs against development libraries provided by the host system via the pkg-config mechanism of library detection. Thanks! -mpb _______________________________________________ gobolinux-devel mailing list gobolinux-devel@lists.gobolinux.org http://lists.gobolinux.org/mailman/listinfo/gobolinux-devel
