Re: Author of gnome-config

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Dave Benson <daveb ffem org> writes:

> at least in my projects, i'd rather not require an extra dependency.
> 
> i wish someone would make a way for pkgconfig to output a standalone
> shell script so users could take advantage of pkgconfig without the dependency.

Two of the big points of pkg-config are:

 - it can properly integrate the dependencies for many libraries
 - you don't need a different automake macro for each package.

A standalone shell script would be incompatible with such features.

The way to solve the "extra dependency" problem is to make pkg-config
so universal that your users already have it. (If your users have
GLib-2.0 installed, they will have pkg-config installed.)

Regards,
                                        Owen