Re: builddirs (was Re: ATK dependency added to GTK+)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Erik Walthinsen <omega temple-baptist com> writes:

> On 3 May 2001, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > Couldn't you just generate a separate uninstalled .pc file for use
> > with this case, which contained builddir hardcoded in the .pc file?
> >
> > i.e. you would generate "gtk+-2.0-builddir.pc" from
> > "gtk+-2.0-builddir.pc.in" and then you would pass that .pc file to
> > pkg-config.
> True.  Then the autoconf macro can use one or the other (assuming there's
> a standard name) if you give it a builddir path on the configure cmdline.
> 
> > Owen points out that there's an issue with libtool wanting relative
> > paths to the .la file, which would maybe involve a pseudo-variable for
> > "directory containing .pc file" so you would have in the .pc file:
> >
> >  Libs: ${pcfiledir}/../../libfoo.la
> >
> > where pcfiledir is the PKG_CONFIG_PATH entry we found the .pc file in,
> > NOT the absolute dir name it's in.
> Hmm, I haven't played with pkg-config much yet.  But having the
> ${pcfiledir} variable would make it that much easier to make these
> builddirs 'relocatable', i.e. the paths are based on the actual current
> location of the builddir.
> 
> An issue that definitely is relevant though is that the ldflags would
> probably have a libtool archive listed by path, which doesn't work at all
> if you're not using libtool.  How can that be worked around?  Do we assume
> that if $USING_LIBTOOL (or somesuch) isn't defined, pkg-config has to put
> in '-static -Lpath -lname' instead of 'path/libname.la'?  Do we even want
> to solve that problem?

I'm pretty sure we have C code to parse .la files in gmodule, so we
could definitely translate .la files into individual -L flags when
necesssary.

With the caveat that you have all the problems of linking against
uninstalled libraries that libtool solves; in particular:

 * On some systems, 'libtool --mode=install' involves relinking
   since the path to the library is hard-coded into the
   executable.

 * You don't get the LD_LIBRARY_PATH setting that the libtool
   wrapper scripts for executables give you so running programs
   is difficult.

I'm not sure that linking against uninstalled libraries without
libtool is something that we should be too concerned with.

Regards,
                                        Owen