Re: pkg-config-0.26

[Julio Merino <jmmv%julipedia.org@localhost>]

On 2/10/12 5:05 PM, Anthony Mallet wrote:
> On Friday, at 16:26, Julio Merino wrote:
> | Good luck maintaining obsolete sources.  Or good luck rewriting this in
> | C, but you'll soon realize that it's not as trivial as it seems.
>
> The trivial version ... is trivial (i.e. the version merely extracting key:
> value pairs and doing variable expansion). It can be written in about 15 lines
> of 'awk' (bsd license excepted ;)
>
> The complete version (handling recursive Require: and filtering duplicate
> c/ldflags) definitely requires more work, but it is also definititely more
> easily written in the "good scripting language" of your choice than in C (not
> even talking about using glib just for that...). Of course you'd have to
> implement all pkg-config bugs to have a really compatible version (Marc Espie
> will probably confirm ;)

That's what I meant; I know that the trivial version is trivial, but 
there is much more to it as you say.  I am afraid that the people 
claiming that rewriting pkg-config is trivial say so because they have 
not seen the corner cases.

Writing such a replacement in anything else other than C would not solve 
the current concerns in pkgsrc.  The pkg-config package would then end 
up depending on a Python/Perl/whatever interpreter (on NetBSD at least), 
and I believe that's much "worse" than depending on glib.  But anyway, 
pkg-config is just a build-time dependency, so not a huge huge deal.