On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 03:43:32PM +0100, Clément Bœsch wrote: > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 02:57:43PM +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote: > > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 02:38:20PM +0100, Clément Bœsch wrote: > > > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 02:23:54PM +0100, Reimar Döffinger wrote: > > > > On Wed, Dec 31, 2014 at 02:09:42PM +0100, Nicolas George wrote: > > > > > Le primidi 11 nivôse, an CCXXIII, Reimar Döffinger a écrit : > > > > > > I don't care much, but I still find not having to use pkg-config > > > > > > somewhat more convenient in a cross-compilation environment where > > > > > > you don't want to install all dependencies just to make it work with > > > > > > pkg-config (or alternatively manually hack those files). > > > > > > > > > > Can you elaborate on that? I suspect there are ways of making this > > > > > work > > > > > easily with pkg-config, but you are to vague about the dependencies > > > > > you want > > > > > to avoid, so I can not suggest a way. > > > > > > > > If I just download libspeex, libfdk_aac, libsdl etc. and build them > > > > with CC=i686-mingw32-gcc ./configure, then without pkg-config I can > > > > just add a few paths to -I and -L and I can link against them. > > > > With pkg-config things tend to get inconsistent and more complicated. > > > > For example some programs (no, I haven't tried lately so I don't > > > > remember examples) generate them only on install, so you have to > > > > make install. But to do that you have to figure out how to specify > > > > a install directory. > > > > > > The .pc files are obviously generally generated because the library they > > > depend on (for static stuff) depends on your configure options, so > > > obviously that's what you want: flags automatically added that way. > > > > The problem isn't them being generated. > > The problem is if it is only "make install" that generates them. > > > > How is that really a problem? You can just ./configure > --prefix=$PWD/install (or wherever you fancy) from the library source > directory
If you do that you end up with an unmaintainable mess where you have all the files from all programs you ever installed in that directory. > You're supposed to have your .pc file in $PREFIX/lib/pkgconfig/x264.pc > along with $PREFIX/lib/x264.pc > > You obviously need to make pkg-config point on the appropriate directory > if it's in a special place (with PKG_CONFIG_PATH). And this process is > widely documented. Where? How would a user who just went to x264.org because he was told to try a newer version ever come across this information? Sure, if you search for explicitly you'll find it, but why would a semi-ordinary user? Also I'm not arguing it's impossible, I'm arguing it's inconvenient. It's something like 2-3 additional steps for each library. I find it very reasonable to try to support special use-cases, I hate all those projects that end up working only on the developers' machines because every other configuration is "unreasonable". pkg-config is always going to be harder to debug when things go wrong because you can end up with all kinds of random compilation flags (for example an "innocent" -L/usr/local/lib that ends up breaking other libraries, but configure can't detect that because it's added only after all the tests were done). I do very much like the idea that you can do e.g. --pkg-config=/bin/false that makes a configuration that works on "most" systems and the parts that don't work can be fixed just by --extra-cflags or --extra-ldflags. No hacking with broken .pc files or having to do other tricks or having to specify -l... for every single library (like for the --pkg-config=/bin/true solution). I am very open to look for solutions of specific issues like the complexity of that as done now or it being enabled by default but I find the "if you're not using pkg-config you are doing it wrong and we should not even try to make things easier for you" argument not something I really agree with, even if it's in many cases correct on the "doing it wrong" part. _______________________________________________ ffmpeg-devel mailing list ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org http://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel
