Re: Build problem

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Tuesday 27 June 2006 12:34 pm, Timoth=E9e Lecomte wrote:
>
> Nevermind, this patch does not solve anything. I uninstalled
> pkg-config, and can reproduce exactly your problem (AC_MSG_WARN
> undefined and PKG_CHECK_MODULES with wrong syntax).
>
> However, I think I have found the right solution. As explained in
> http://programming.linux.com/programming/05/08/11/1923248.shtml?tid=3D2
>2 ("Best Practices with autotools"), we should always distribute the
> macros we are using, because the user may have an old and buggy macro
> or he may not have it at all.
>
> So the solution is to put 'pkg.m4' taken from the pkg-config package
> in <gnuplot source directory>/m4

I would prefer to remove the dependence on pkgconfig altogether.

Since when is it reasonable to require a particular package manager?
Particularly one which is only at release level 0.19, is not installed
by default, and clearly has portability issues.

As I previously described, in order to get wxWidgets up and running
I first had to find and install pkgconfig. But that wasn't sufficient;
I then had to go back and re-install earlier packages. What a pain.

As tested here, and confirmed by Hardy Griech, configure + install
works just fine without the pkgconfig macros.  Of course there can
always be compatibility issues with different library versions,
but we really need to check these at run-time or install-time,
not at the time ./configure is run.  So I continue to think that
pkg-config is a poor solution to the problem, and should be avoided.


=2D-=20
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center
University of Washington, Seattle WA