Hi Ludo, On Fri, 03 Feb 2017 17:49:38 +0100 l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) wrote:
> I think ‘dub-build-system’ could add it as an implicit input, much like > ‘gnu-build-system’ adds binutils as an implicit input. Okay, but it's directly used only by dub (it its function of building D packages). I don't think D packages themselves even know what pkg-config is. The ldc 1.1.0 sources don't even mention "pkg-config" once - neither do any of the D packages I tried except gtk-d. That one mentions it in comments how to invoke gdc (which we didn't package) and rdmd (rdmd source itself doesn't mention pkg-config either) - both are in shell expressions like gdc CoreGL.d `pkg-config gtkd-3 gl --cflags --libs` and rdmd `pkg-config gtkd-3 --cflags` -L-lGL -L-ldl CoreGL.d). No non-comment reference at all. That said, we could add pkg-config as an implicit input so that if D packages decided to directly use it in the future they'd pick up the same one. > Or we could simply let people add pkg-config as an input when it’s > necessary, just like we do for ‘gnu-build-system’ packages. dub itself does automatically use pkg-config. It's as if make always used pkg-config (whether you write "pkg-config" into a Makefile or not). Also, if pkg-config is not available dub will silently fallback to guessing. It will not fail (and that's bad!). I've just had to fix a problem (in another non-D package) where it didn't use pkg-config and so it didn't pick up the Unicode codepoint "-D" option and it broke some stuff silently at runtime. That's exactly what can happen when programs guess the library import flags.
