Re: [cairo] COPYING files....

On Tue, 2004-02-17 at 17:09 -0600, Jeff Carr wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 08:02, Egbert Eich wrote:
> 
> >  > The nicest part about all of this is that once the tarballs are built, the 
> >  > target system need have *none* of the autoconf/automake tool chain 
> >  > installed.
> > 
> > I used to believe that, too.
> > When I tried to build Xlib configure failed horribly (with a syntax error, 
> > not a sane error message) when I did not have pkg-config installed.
> 
> That sounds like correct behavior from the point of view of
> autoconf/automake. After all, that is the point of the configure script:
> to determine if you have everything you need on your system to correctly
> build the software. (pkg-config isn't part of autoconf/automake)
> 
> It's a shame that it didn't give a clearer error about the missing
> pkg-config (a check worthy of adding), but nonetheless the move to the
> "more standard" gnu tools is encouraging.

It's completely possible to use autotools without depending on
pkgconfig.  One option is to allow the old-fashioned --with-whatever=/
the/install/path and only using pkg-config if that isn't specified.
Users without the tool can just put up with the extra work of specifying
the command line options (like they've always had to), while users who
are smart and install pkg-config can let it take care of menial details
for them.

I do agree that pkg-config autoconf macros should provide a much clearer
and nicer error message when pkg-config isn't found.
-- 
Sean Middleditch <[email protected]>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.