On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 at 22:41, Daniel Gustafsson wrote: > > > On 10 Mar 2020, at 11:53, Hugh McMaster <hugh.mcmas...@outlook.com> wrote: > > This patch uses pkg-config's PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro to detect libxml2 > > or, if pkg-config is not available, falls back to xml2-confg. > > This was previously discussed in 20200120204715.ga73...@msg.df7cb.de which > ended without a real conclusion on what could/should be done (except that > nothing *had* to be done). > > What is the situation on non-Debian/Ubuntu systems (BSD's, macOS etc etc)? Is > it worth adding pkg-config support if we still need a fallback to xml2-config?
To the best of my knowledge, FreeBSD, macOS, OpenSUSE, Solaris etc. all support detection of libxml2 via pkg-config. One way or another, xml2-config is going away, whether by decision of a package maintainer or upstream. freetype-config was deprecated upstream a few years ago. Upstream ICU will also disable the installation of icu-config by default from April this year. Some systems, such as Debian, have not shipped icu-config for a year or so. The PHP project last year switched to using pkg-config by default for all libraries supplying a .pc file. PHP's build scripts do not fall back to legacy scripts. Another reason for switching is that xml2-config incorrectly outputs static libraries when called with `--libs`. You have to call `--libs --dynamic` to output -lxml2 only. Debian patches the script to avoid this unusual behaviour.
