Re: pkg-config-0.26

[Marc Espie <espie%nerim.net@localhost>]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 10:54:02PM +0000, David Holland wrote:
> Pursuing a replacement seems like a decent plan, assuming someone's
> willing to do it. ISTM that it should just be a shell script, but
> maybe I'm underestimating how much work it does.

You are underestimating slightly.

We do have pkg-config as a perl script, and a large part of the script
deals with simplifying linker lines: most *.pc files out there reference
libraries from other pc files. If you don't trim the extra baggage, you
end up with linker lines with 200+ libraries and -L flags, 
most of it redundant, which cause huge log files, and extra grief to a 
lot of tools with hard limits on such...

Then again, that's to be expected from GNU-tools.

They have so much infrastructure that they forget how much they have (to
wit, recent gcc archives, which include libtool config files in the main
directory *and* in the libgo language subdirectory).