Re: configure's dependency on pkg-config

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

On Sat, 12 Nov 2011 15:13:49 +0100 Jan Djärv <jan.h.d@swipnet.se> wrote:

> Hi.
>
> 11 nov 2011 kl. 20:25 skrev Stephen Berman:
[...]
>> Is there a better way to override configure's dependency on pkg-config
>> for libraries such as libxml2, so that it would suffice to pass the
>> standard variable CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS and LIBS?  Or if there isn't, should
>> there be?
>
> I would assume libxml2 installs its .pc-file in /usr/lib/pkgconfig (or
> similar) when you install it, so all the info is there.  So why not just
> install pkg-config?  It is a very small package.

No doubt pkg-config is convenient and of course I could install it; but
my experience shows that even though it's not necessary, you can't avoid
it by setting the recommended variables at configure time.  So this
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
and also list all of these libraries.  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); are there any platforms Emacs runs on that cannot use
pkg-config but on which Emacs could use libxml2 etc.?

Steve Berman