Re: circular dependency between glib and pkg-config

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 at 23:52:26 -0700, stuart zulazon com wrote:
>   CXXCPP      C++ preprocessor

There are many more like this (CC, LD, CXXFLAGS etc.), but they're standard
for all Autotools packages, and none are mandatory.

>   PCRE_CFLAGS C compiler flags for PCRE, overriding pkg-config
>   PCRE_LIBS   linker flags for PCRE, overriding pkg-config

If you're building with the internal libpcre you don't need these; only
distributions who want to link everything against a shared libpcre need them.

>   DBUS1_CFLAGS
>               C compiler flags for DBUS1, overriding pkg-config
>   DBUS1_LIBS  linker flags for DBUS1, overriding pkg-config

I happen to know that these are only needed for full regression tests.

> However I had to discover this by trial and error, not by reading INSTALL.
>  I've learned a number of interesting and useful things from the journey,
> which I don't regret at all, but don't think people should be required to
> to more than read INSTALL just in order to build from source.

To be fair, you were bootstrapping it from source on a platform with neither
GLib nor pkg-config, which is pretty unusual. You have to start somewhere;
you also need a libc, a C compiler, a POSIX shell, a Make implementation etc.,
and INSTALL doesn't explain how to get those.

The other way to start the process is to cross-compile GLib and/or pkg-config
for your host platform, on a build platform that already has them (you can
use your build architecture's pkg-config binary to configure GLib) - that's
how you'd typically start off for embedded development, for instance.

See <http://wiki.debian.org/DebianBootstrap> for some thoughts on how
bootstrapping an architecture works in general (pkg-config is nowhere near
the most difficult case).

    S