[CMake] pkg-config at Windows Command Prompt

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-09-27 16:12-0400 Brandon Van Every wrote:

> [...]There are no Windows binaries of pkg-config
> available on the website.  Googling around, I don't see any kind of
> self-contained pkg-config.exe for use on the Windows Command Prompt.
> I do see some .exe's that are part of Cygwin or MSYS toolchains.

Hi Brandon:

http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html is a site that contains
windows binaries for the libgtk+ dependencies (which include glib and
pkg-config).  I have been made aware of this site because it apparently
works for our PLplot windows developers when building one of our libgtk+
related device drivers on windows. I just downloaded pkg-config-0.20.zip
from there, and there is indeed a bin/pkg-config.exe inside that zip.

>
> Questions:
>
> 1) does pkg-config.exe work from the Windows Command Prompt,
> independent of any MSYS shell environment that was used to build it?
> i.e. is it really "native" ?
>

That's an important question.  Please try the pkg-config.exe that I found
above (I have no access to windows so I cannot try it myself) and let us
know the answer.  I assume you have to download the glib windows binary
package from that same site as well.

> [out of order]If you look at the current source release, you will see that it is an
> Autoconf build.

I agree that the current autoconf build requirement is a real turnoff for
windows users (and everybody else here :-) ).  However, if the binary
version of pkg-config that I found passes the above test, then that might
motivate somebody to port the build system for it and glib to CMake.

BTW, the reason I have been doing some pkg-config advocacy here is I have
had good experiences with it as a Linux/Unix developer.  It's a
straightforward tool that is easy to use from the command line or from CMake
to derive needed compilation and linking information for a given package.
Also, it is extremely easy to export compiler and linking information for a
given software package in pkg-config form (that is what we do with PLplot,
for example, to make it easy to build applications that use the various
PLplot libraries).  Thus, when I saw the pkg-config website assertion today
that it worked on windows, that seemed important to me.  Thus, I really do
hope for the sake of windows developers and PLplot windows users that your
test of the above binary version of pkg-config works out.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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