Re: GTKDOC_DEPS in recent gtk-doc.m4

[Simon Josefsson <simon josefsson org>]

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.

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