Re: pkg-config output on the Windows platform?

[John Pye <john curioussymbols com>]

Hi Tor,

Tor Lillqvist wrote:
>  > >  > Can anyone tell me what system pkg-config uses when some/all of the C
>  > >  > Preprocessor paths contain spaces?
>
>  > > How hard would it be to try yourself? ;)
>
>  > Well, quite hard :-). I would have to download and attempt to build all 
>  > of GTK and whatever its dependencies are. Not keen for that.
>
> No need to (attempt to) build anything, it would have been enough to
> download pkg-config for Windows:
>   http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/dependencies/pkg-config-0.20.zip
>
> and for instance the GLib developer package for Windows:
>   http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/glib/2.12/glib-dev-2.12.4.zip
>
> , unzip them somewhere in a patch with spaces, set PKG_CONFIG_PATH if
> necessary (if you unzipped the pkg-config zipfile and developer
> package into different trees), and just try running 
>   pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0 .
>
> Based on Yevgen Muntyan's reply, pkg-config's problem with spaces in
> paths is cross-platform, not specific to Windows. I haven't read the
> pkg-config source code in a while, and can't say whether it is
> possible to fix it.
>   

OK, fair point

>  > Actually the reason I ask this question here is that you guys have got 
>  > the 'pkg-config' tool and although I'm not sure that this 'standard' 
>  > started here, that was my best guess.
>
>  > The '*-config' concept is a pretty 
>  > good one when it comes to building packages that have dependencies on 
>  > other ones,
>
> When you say *-config, do you mean pkg-config, or the older *-config
> shell scripts from each package (for instance, gtk-config) that were
> succeded by pkg-config and the package-specific .pc files?
>   

Well actually either, I guess. I don't know too much history of GTK, I 
guess. I have seen the *-config scripts used in other projects, like 
CppUnit and GiNaC from my particular experience. I guess this 'standard' 
use of a shell script to pull out compiler flags for already-installed 
libraries must have come from somewhere, right? For some reason I 
thought it had come from GTK. But perhaps not.

>  > and that's what I'm trying to pick up on and use on the 
>  > Windows platform... but this means that the *-config tool must support 
>  > spaces,
>
> Well, I'm not that sure this is a problem. Several people have been
> using pkg-config on Windows, and nobody has noticed until now (well,
> nobody has complained) that paths with spaces cause a problem. Still,
> it would be nice to fix this indeed.
>   

I think recall seeing a binary version of GTK that installed to 
c:\Program Files\GTK but I think it may not have included pkg-config. Or 
maybe it was just Inkscape or something like that, which includes its 
own copy of GTK.

>  > My guess is that one should use flags in a form that could be pasted 
>  > into the Bash command-line.
>
> Sure. (Or, if the --msvc-syntax flag has been passed to pkg-config,
> into a cmd.exe command line.)
>   

Good thinking. Sounds right.

Cheers
JP