Re: A proposal for Midnight Commander

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello,

> > 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:
> Sure, let's depend on XFree86 4.3 too, it's getting more and more
> ubiquitous everywhere.

Glib is a core dependency for many projects.  X is a large windowing
system.

I am trying to have a technical discussion and respectful to you.  

> > 	* Solaris ship with this, and MacOS will have to ship it as
> > 	  part of their X distro to support fontconfig. 
> I don't have solaris, nor macos.

Those were examples of systems outside of the open source world that
*might* be considered non GNU-toolchain compliant, and where the major
objection to use pkg-config might come from.

If you are using Linux, you probably already have glib installed.   If
you do any kind of development in any of the new projects, you probably
also have pkg-config.

> > but pkg-config fixes a long standing problem in the Unix world: how to
> > detect, use and consume libraries easily.
> Sure. Ever tried to compile some pkgconfig-user program in "userspace", eg
> both with --prefix=/home/anywhere ? It won't work. Only as root, and /usr.
> So much for fixing long standing problems. (try sidplay2-lib and sidplay2
> packages for example)

I use software in /usr/local, /mono, /install, /miguel, /toys and /usr,
and they all work fine.   Hint: man pkg-config

Reading the man page instead of flaming will not hurt you.

Miguel.