Re: why does pkg-config --libs not produce -Wl,--rpath -Wl,LIBDIR?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, May 02, 2003 at 02:08:26PM -0800, Britton wrote:
> I am just wondering why when pkg-config spits out all the other stuff
> (-L/wherever/pc/file/said, etc.) it doesn't add the linker flags so you
> actually link against what you are trying to link against by setting
> environment variable PKG_CONFIG_PATH?

pkg-config only handles the case where you have a list of library
prefixes A:B:C and you prefer all libs in A over those in B, and all
those in B over those in C. It doesn't let you prefer B over A for
some libs. (A setup like that doesn't work well anyhow due to PATH,
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and so on having the same limitation.)

If you extended it to handle that case, I'm not sure you want to do it
via rpath - I thought that would encode some extra data into the ELF
object that isn't desireable. e.g. rpmlint complains about it.

A unification of pkg-config/libtool that handles all link issues
properly is needed, right now neither pkg-config nor libtool has all
the needed info to get things fully right, but they both work well
enough most of the time that nobody is hacking on a grand unified fix.

Havoc