Re: builddirs (was Re: ATK dependency added to GTK+)

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:

> Owen points out that there's an issue with libtool wanting relative
> paths to the .la file, which would maybe involve a pseudo-variable for
> "directory containing .pc file" so you would have in the .pc file:
> 
>  Libs: ${pcfiledir}/../../libfoo.la
> 
> where pcfiledir is the PKG_CONFIG_PATH entry we found the .pc file in,
> NOT the absolute dir name it's in.

If someone implements this, a somewhat icky, but, I think useful
feature would be to allow PKG_CONFIG_PATH to contain shell
variables which are expanded when looking up elements in
the path, but not when substituting in for ${pcfiledir}.

The reason this would be useful is so that in configure.in, you
can do:

 top_builddir=.                                                 \
 PKG_CONFIG_PATH="\${top_builddir}/../glib:$PKG_CONFIG:PATH"    \
   pkg-config --libs glib-build

And get:

  ${top_builddir}/../glib/libglib.la -L foo

Rather than

 ./../glib/libglib.la -L foo

The former can be used in a makefile in a subdirectory, the latter
can't.

Regards,
                                        Owen