Re: A proposal for Midnight Commander

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello Pavel,

> There is a specific problem with glib 2.x, which is the fact that it
> relies on non-common infrastructure, such as pkg-config.  I have voiced my
> concerns about it already.  I believe that pkg-config should have been a
> script, not a C program.  I do agree that glib 2.x is unnecessarily hard
> to compile on OSes without GNU tools preinstalled.
> 
> But since glib 1.2.x is not going away, we can support it.  Thanks to
> Miguel's clarification, I believe that glib is a good choice.

My personal vote would go for Glib 2.x.  Even if it is slightly harder
to build on old systems, it is becoming more and more ubiquitous
everywhere:

	* Solaris ship with this, and MacOS will have to ship it as
	  part of their X distro to support fontconfig. 

	* Every Linux system that uses Freedesktop.org or Gnome will
	  have it (Cairo, Fontconfig, depend on it anyways).

	* Every installation where Mozilla runs will have it too.

I know it is very desktop-centric, but pkg-config fixes a long standing
problem in the Unix world: how to detect, use and consume libraries
easily.

And glib 2 provides a lot nicer IO support (the kind that would be nice
to replace the stuff in key.c). 

Miguel