Re: GTKDOC_DEPS in recent gtk-doc.m4

[Stefan Sauer <ensonic hora-obscura de>]

On 12/04/2011 12:49 PM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> Stefan Sauer <ensonic hora-obscura de> writes:
>
>> On 12/01/2011 08:30 PM, Nicola Fontana wrote:
>>> On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 22:13:34 +0100
>>> Simon Josefsson <simon josefsson org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi!  I'm using gtk-doc in for example GNU Libtasn1 and recently upgraded
>>>> to the latest gtk-doc.m4 from your git repo, which contains this new
>>>> piece of code:
>>>>
>>>>     dnl don't check for glib if we build glib
>>>>     if test "x$PACKAGE_NAME" != "xglib"; then
>>>>       dnl don't fail if someone does not have glib
>>>>       PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GTKDOC_DEPS, glib-2.0 >= 2.10.0 gobject-2.0  >= 2.10.0,,)
>>>>     fi
>>> It should be:
>>>        PKG_CHECK_MODULES(GTKDOC_DEPS, glib-2.0 >= 2.10.0 gobject-2.0
>>>> = 2.10.0,,[:])
>> what is the semantics for [:] ?
> David already answered that.
>
>> It works for me and the point of this check is that we only check for
>> glib if we don't build glib.
> Why is a developer environment for glib required when building
> documentation?
>
> I'm assuming it works for you because you have glib header files etc
> installed, but that is not always the case.
It is only used in the introspection scanner. If your library is not
gobject based, you will have an empty .types file and not running
gtkdoc-scangobj. This is just to get the required CFLAGS, LDFLAGS to
build the scanner.

Stefan
> I'm using gtk-doc in several projects (GNU Libtasn1, GnuTLS, Shishi,
> GSS, GNU SASL, GNU Libidn, Libidn2, and maybe others) which do not have
> any dependency on glib otherwise, and it has worked fine so far before
> this change was introduced in gtk-doc.m4 recently.
>
> The generated documentation looks fine if I apply the patch here to let
> building proceed even when glib is unavailable.
>
> I'm sure gtk-doc-tools are used in many other projects that doesn't
> require glib as well, so I believe it would be quite unfortunate for
> gtk-doc to require a glib development environment.
>
> /Simon