Re: built-in libarchive

[Patrick Welche <prlw1%cam.ac.uk@localhost>]

On Tue, May 29, 2018 at 10:18:53AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Why do you say PKG_CHECK_MODULES is silly (other than randomly being
> inflammatory for fun)?  There is a real issue lurking, which is that a
> package's ABI either does or doesn't include a pkgconfig file.  If it
> does, it's basically sensible to use it.  And if a package sometimes has
> it and sometimes doesn't, that's broken.  If it was added at some point,
> using pkgconfig at configure time is implicitly declaring that only new
> enough versions are acceptable.

Because of my long held view that pkg-config was invented because learning
m4 was seen as too much of a time investment. Test for features, not
version numbers.  Case in point: do packages really really need fontconfig
2.13.0? On top of it, maintainers tended to be experts in the field of
their package, and look with suspicion at patches for configure.{in,ac}
from unknown contributors, which then seems to have lead to a dislike
for autotools. What will you use now? cmake? meson? jam? ...? Maybe
this is randomly inflammatory ;-)

Cheers,

Patrick

(What to do about libarchive.pc was answered by wiz - investigating...)