Re: pkg-config and glib

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Wolfgang Sourdeau <wolfgang contre com> writes:

> >>>>> In article <ybevgq58ehw fsf fresnel labs redhat com>, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> writes:
> 
>     Owen> Is rewriting a bunch of code that could just be used
>     Owen> cleaner?
> 
>     Owen> It _is_ glib independent, it just happens to have a bunch of
>     Owen> code in it that looks a lot like GLib.
> 
> What is not "so clean" is that the glib functions that are needed
> depend on other function which depend on other functions... that the
> original program has nothing to do with.
> 
> It is like the Perl to C translation which, for a stupid Hello World
> style programs gives you a .c file of 55 Kb. Well, I know
> automatisation of source writing is not easy to do, but this mean that
> perl doesn't really take into account what the actual program really needs.
> 
> So, while I agree it may be clean in its core. The extra source needed
> make it no so clean. This is not as bad as if the original program was
> not clean though.

I'm sorry - are you saying that it is cleaner to rewrite everything
from scratch every time?

Yes, pkg-config could have been written in hand-coded assembly using
syscalls directly.

The effect of that would have been:

 a) A less functional program
 b) Several months less of programmer time to put into GTK+-2.0.


I cannot see _ANY_ difference between statically linking to glib, as
pkg-config does, and linking dynamically in terms of cleanliness.

Yes, the resulting binary size is a tiny bit bigger. Does it 
matter? No.

Yes, the source tarball is quite a bit bigger. Does it matter?
Hardly at all.

And between using GLib and rewriting from scratch, using 
GLib is just the dead-obvious easy, clean, simple, logical
choice.


I think this whole debate is really silly. 

If someone wants to create a stripped-down version of GLib
to ship with pkg-config instead of the full version, we'd
take the patch.

If someone wants to rewrite pkg-config not to use Glib, well, we
probably wouldn't take the patch, but it's a legitimate, if not
reasonable, thing to do.

If someone says _we_ should rewrite pkg-config not to use GLib, then
they can talk themselves blue in the face. It isn't going to happen.

                                        Owen