Re: circular dependency between glib and pkg-config

[Stuart Ambler <stuart zulazon com>]

Thanks Ryan,

For those who want to read quickly, the last paragraph mentions what 
might be a bug in the glib make install, forgotten in my first post.

Looking into glib more in response to replies from the list, the 
dependence of pkg-config on glib seems less like buying a car in order 
to listen to its radio, and more like buying a fancy stereo system to 
listen to a few favorite radio stations.  The file size of the libglib 
dylibs at about 2.8 MB isn't too excessive on the Mac OS X system that 
got me into this.  Glib now seems me like a reasonable possibility for C 
programs in some common environments to extend the standard C library, 
done enough that it's mentioned in 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_standard_library.  The main event loop 
might not be needed by most command line tools, but might be useful even 
to some of them.  Thanks for your patience.

However, is there something easy to find (maybe it should go in the 
tarballs for both packages) that says clearly how to build glib and 
pkg-config when neither are present to start with?

It seems that the pkg-config README in your message tried to address 
that, but sorry, I didn't see what zlib had to do with the dependency of 
glib on pkg-config.  ("To build pkg-config, you need glib installed 
already.  Note that glib build-depends on pkg-config, but you can just 
set the corresponding environment variables (ZLIB_LIBS, ZLIB_CFLAGS are 
the only needed ones when this is written) to build it.")

Actually, though, my notes for the glib build from tarball don't say 
that the glib configure, make, or make install complained about lack of 
pkg-config; so maybe pkg-config is only needed if running autoconf?

Also, http://developer.gnome.org/glib/2.28/glib-building.html refers the 
reader to ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.2/dependencies for the version of 
pkg-config needed to build glib, version 0.14 available for download.  I 
gather that this version of pkg-config didn't depend on glib.  Can it be 
used to satisfy glib's dependency on pkg-config?

After apparently successfully building glib 2.28.7, I built pkg-config. 
 In addition to setting the GLIB_* environment variables mentioned in 
the README, apparently I needed manually to copy glib/glibconfig.h from 
the glib build directory to its install directory; it wasn't there where 
the rest of the glib header files were, as I recall copied by glib make 
install.  After that, but not before, the pkg-config make worked.

Thanks again.

On 9/27/2011 1:35 PM, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> hi Stuart,
>
> On Sun, 2011-09-25 at 13:45 -0600, Stuart Ambler wrote:
> > Apparently pkg-config used to contain within it an old version of
> > glib, used mostly for strings, lists, hash tables, and a few other
> > things, that the new version has removed and instead made itself
> > depend on glib.  glib documentation, on the other hand, says that
> > glib is dependent on pkg-config.
>
> See the pkg-config README about this:
>
>    http://cgit.freedesktop.org/pkg-config/tree/README#n33
>
> Cheers