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Re: 2.4 commit review

Hugh McMaster wrote:
> On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 at 21:59, Howard Chu wrote:
>> Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
>>> Howard, what's your opinion/thought on adding this for master/RE25?  Ryan tested it and it worked for him.
>>
>> My personal opinion is that pkg-config is garbage and in all my experience it has
>> only ever prevented me from building whatever I was working on at the time.
> 
> I get the feeling there's an interesting backstory here. I'm actually
> quite surprised you've had a bad experience with pkg-config.
> It's really quite useful and far easier than calling foo-config legacy scripts.
> 
> With regards to merging #8996, you didn't really answer Quanah's
> question. I'll also point out that you're not being forced to use
> openldap's pkg-config files.
> 
> Many people prefer pkg-config because of its simplicity in handling
> library dependencies and header inclusions. I'm simply trying to
> extend this simplicity to openldap.

AFAICS it is just another moving part that breaks. It doesn't provide any information.
To use it you have to know whether to look in the /usr configs or /usr/local (or other places),
If I know to look in /usr/local to find the package config I want, then I already know that the
header and lib paths I need are in /usr/local and it hasn't helped at all.

More importantly, relying on it actively prevents you from working with packages in their
own build directories. As someone who frequently has to build multiple versions of various
dependencies to check that they all work with our OpenLDAP builds, I can't be bothered to
re-install every different version I'm working with, particularly when I could otherwise
just add a few items to LDFLAGS, LIBPATH, or whatnot. Every time I run across a build
script that requires using pkg-config to find a package I have to go through and comment
it out just so my env var settings will take effect.

So from an active developer's perspective, it adds steps but doesn't add useful information.

-- 
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/