>We have finally figured it out after some debugging via IRC: David has >had set PKG_CONFIG=true when configuring Guile, which lead to an >installation with a (silently) broken guile-config script; >meta/guile-config.in contains: > >(define %pkg-config-program "@PKG_CONFIG@") > >The mayhem that resulted is left to the (hopefully vivid) imagination of >the reader ;-). > >IMO, the following advice given in Guile's README is quite dangerous, as >can be seen from David's issue: > > - pkg-config > > Guile's ./configure script uses pkg-config to discover the correct > compile and link options for libgc and libffi. If you don't have > pkg-config installed, or you have a version of libgc that doesn't > provide a .pc file, you can work around this by setting some > variables as part of the configure command-line: > > - PKG_CONFIG=true > > - BDW_GC_CFLAGS=<compile flags for picking up libgc headers> > > - BDW_GC_LIBS=<linker flags for picking up the libgc library> > > Note that because you're bypassing all pkg-config checks, you will > also have to specify libffi flags as well: > > - LIBFFI_CFLAGS=<compile flags for picking up libffi headers> > > - LIBFFI_LIBS=<linker flags for picking up the libffi library> > >Note the PKG_CONFIG=true setting. This should at least come with a big >fat warning that the resulting installation of Guile will be broken >wrt. to building any software depending on Guile (unless the software in >question bypasses guile-config). Alternatively, we could scrap that >section altogether and just say that pkg-config is required (which is in >fact true, with the current state of afairs).
IIRC, the PKG_CONFIG=true hack was because of a bug in pkg.m4 that wouldn't let you bypass pkg-config using the XXX_CFLAGS and XXX_LIBS if you didn't have pkg-config installed. Newer versions of pkg.m4 have fixed this. -Mike
