Re: configure's dependency on pkg-config

[Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>]

On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 17:59:02 -0500 Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> wrote:

> Stephen Berman wrote:
>
>> seems to be at least a doc bug in INSTALL, which should explicitly say
>> that pkg-config is required in order for Emacs to use certain libraries
>
> It already says enough IMO
>
>   For some libraries, like Gtk+, fontconfig and ALSA, `configure' uses
>   pkg-config to find where those libraries are installed.

Not enough, since it doesn't mention libxml2, which was the one I was
concerned with.  And it should just list them all; there aren't that
many.  (It would also be less confusing if this dependency were stated
before mentioning the configure time variables CPPFLAGS etc., making it
clear that these only work for libraries that Emacs doesn't use
pkg-config to locate.)

>> The alternative would be to patch configure (or rather configure.in)
>> to allow setting the standard configure time variables to override
>> using pkg-config. This seems better to me in principle (though it
>> might be judged not to be worth the effort);
>
> It's not worth the effort. Just install pkg-config and move on.

If it had been documented in INSTALL I would have.

Steve Berman