Hugh McMaster wrote: > Hi Howard, > > On Sun, 24 Nov 2019 at 01:59, Howard Chu wrote: >> AFAICS it is just another moving part that breaks. It doesn't provide any >> information. >> To use it you have to know whether to look in the /usr configs or /usr/local >> (or other places), > > pkg-config automatically knows where the headers and libraries are, > since information is hard-coded into the pc file. If the headers and > libraries are installed in a standard system location (e.g. /usr/lib > or /usr/include), this information is not passed to the command line, > since the paths are already in the environment.If you have pkg-config > files in a custom location (e.g. /opt), you can simply set > PKG_CONFIG_PATH and you'll get > -L/opt/my/custom/path -ldap -lber > > It's just a different workflow. > > One of the problems with detecting openldap is that developers need to > know where the libraries and headers are. pkg-config handles this for > you when compiling. (And yes, I'll admit developers should know this > anyway.) > For instance, how many people know ldap depends on lber?
If they're linking to shared libraries, they don't need to know, since libldap.so already links to liblber.so. If we had a sane static library implementation, that included its dependency libraries in a __LIBS element (the same way ranlib stores symbol offsets in a __SYMDEF element in static libraries) then nobody would ever need to know. pkg-config is a bullshit hack that doesn't solve the root problem. >> If I know to look in /usr/local to find the package config I want, then I >> already know that the >> header and lib paths I need are in /usr/local and it hasn't helped at all. > > The point is that you had to know about your setup. And pkg-config doesn't change that; I still have to know where the .pc files went. > But I > don't believe it's fair to prevent people from having the option to > use pkg-config support if we can offer it. We have a project policy of not including content we can't support. And as a general circumstance, if we don't use something ourselves, then we aren't in a position to support it. Are you going to be here for the next 20+ years to support this addition? -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
