[CMake] Interresting dependency problem

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 28.09.07 11:23:15, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2007-09-28 11:51+0200 Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> 
> >On 28.09.07 03:31:26, Hendrik Sattler wrote:
> >>I only used it with msys so far and it's working, there, using the GLIB dll
> >>and the provided pre-compiled pkgconfig binary.
> >
> >Yeap, thats a problem already.
> 
> Sorry, Andreas, but in your rush to be negative about pkg-config without
> even trying it yourself your logic has become suspect.  We get the message
> that you don't like MSYS, but the fact that pkg-config works fine with MSYS
> says nothing about whether it works without it or not.  Until Brandon or
> some other non-MSYS windows user answers my specific question on that, we
> just don't know.
> 
> I personally don't care whether you user pkg-config or not.  But I do object
> when you go out of your way to be critical of it for a platform case where
> you haven't even tried it yet.  I urge others here to wait until the facts
> are in before they rush to judgement.

Sigh :) Didn't I say that my statements are second-hand experience from
people who do know what they are doing and did try pkg-config and know
that it doesn't work without MSYS?

Well, anyway, tried it and there we are, unix-paths in the output so
there's no way these flags can be used in a win32 native environment.
However looking at the .pc files and the output of pkg-config as well as
pkg-config --help it seems that at least the problem with moving libs
and getting MSVC flags is solved. There's a --msvc-syntax switch (for
usage of pkg-config inside cmake this doesn't matter anyway) and it also
seems that some guessing happens when trying to choose a good prefix to
set before the /lib or /include dirs. That guessing breaks as soon as I
move the .pc files into a directory hierarchy that doesn't follow unix
style though.

Also when using pkg-config with cmake there's still the problem of
having to "parse" its output and removing the various compiler flags
(i.e -l, -L, -I), which can fail if the paths are weird. This shows that
pkg-config is not being developed as a buildsystem-independent thing,
but at least partly bound to autotools.

Andreas

-- 
You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny.