Chris wrote:
> Hello Murray, Hello Brian,
>
> Firstly let me apologize for my attitude here :-)
> Someone has done a lot of work and all I did was to complain. Sorry.
>
>
> >pkg-config is not obscure. Anyway, you seem to have found it:
>
>
> Yes, by default it wasn't installed on our Linux system ( Mandrake )
> as the packaging system used is RPM as is the case with RedHat and SuSE.
That's interesting. Do you have Gnome-2.0 installed? (I forget if it
came with Gnome 1.4, nor do I remember if it comes with KDE 3, although
it's supposed to be for both KDE 3 and Gnome 2.)
Worse cast scenario is, we ask you to download pkg-config and
build/install it. Easier is if there's a Mandrake RPM ready...
pkg-config ships with Mandrake 9.0; I haven't checked previous releases
(and the mirror I'm looking at only keeps the latest-greatest). Well,
according to rpmfind.net, there's a very of pkg-config in the Mandrake
"Cooker" (newer than the one in 9.0) at,
http://www.rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/cooker/cooker/i586/Mandrake/RPMS/pkgconfig-0.14.0-1mdk.i586.html
If you find yourself downloading the 'Cooker" version, I would instead
download the source code RPM file, and force rpm to build-from-source.
As I recall, that's rpm -ba blah.srpm and I believe you have to be root
to do it (I'm a Debian user nowadays)
> I really love Linux / Unix in general and one of it's greatest strengths
>
> has got to be the variety of choices it offers. Unfortunately, from a
> user
> perspective, one often finds oneself implementing a framework to support
> a single application. We switched to the MySQL++ API for the simply
> reason
> that it required nothing beyond the stock configuration.
It's often a "religious" issue. Ubiquitous use of pkg-config was assumed
by everyone by the Gnome-2 developers, but that does not mean that's a
Lingua Franca. For example, the number of systems that still have Gnome
1.4 or KDE 2.4 is amazing. As we're closer to the trees than the forest,
it's hard for us to know where the cut-off is. And too, there's nothing
like forcing the issue to make the transition "snappy"; again, a sympton
of trees versus forest vision...
And really, that's for everything, not just pkg-config. There are people
out there requiring the use of the very latest, released-last-week
version of autoconf that lots of users don't have. We all want instant
user-base, so the latest tools get wider testing & are thereby made more
stable. Lot easier to find bugs with 4M users than just the core
developer group of 4 :-)
--
____ .:. ____
Bryan W. Headley - bwh...@ea...
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