U-config – A new, lean pkg-config clone • Hacker News Board

Re: U-config – A new, lean pkg-config clone

#51

Post by jcelerier » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 4:19 AM UTC

saurik wrote: post #44

jcelerier wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pkg-config, on the other hand, is rather small. The initial implementation was bulky enough to annoy people into at least two rewrites, but the concepts are few and the requirements on the host build system practically nonexistent. yet all these years and it's still a pain on Windows with the Visual Studio world. And if it doesn't work with VS (as in, you can have a VS solution which uses pkg-config automatically t…

If you are serious about cross-platform, the answer is simple, and has been the same for decades: don't use Visual Studio to build for Windows, as it isn't offering you anything of value. This answer used to be maybe a bit controversial--hell: I even supported Visual Studio for years back in the early '00s--but now even Chrome builds with clang... if it is good enough for Chrome, it is good enough for you.

the main soft I develop (https://ossia.io) has been built through clang/libc++ on msw for 4+ years now so you are preaching to the choir, but many companies insist in building with msvc and you cannot just tell them "no"

Re: U-config – A new, lean pkg-config clone

#52

Post by synergy20 » Thu, Jan 19, 2023, 5:02 AM UTC

saurik wrote: post #43

synergy20 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for one thing, pkg-config really should do -isystem instead of -I for headers, -isystem helps editor to not bother checking them for syntax conformity, otherwise my vi sometimes produces thousands of lines of warnings for those standard header files, and I have to add isystem to them manually. cmake smartly converts pkg-config's -I to -isystem nowadays, which is great.

That really seems like it should be the purview of the build system (such as cmake), not pkg-config. The flags provided by pkg-config should be as simple and obvious and easy to reason about and as portable as possible (and, worst case, as consistent as possible so you can convert it to some different flag format, as arguably is being done there by cmake). The goal of -isystem has nothing to do with syntax highlighti…

make sense,thanks

Re: U-config – A new, lean pkg-config clone

#53

Post by mathstuf » Fri, Jan 20, 2023, 8:22 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #45

mathstuf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flag soup is terrible for dependency management. It only works for a single compiler (family), there's no semantics of what each flag might mean, undefined ordering or grouping of flags like `-ffast-math` or `-fno-fast-math` (which are ABI-affecting) means you don't know what you'll actually get. More fun, if you have multiple prefixes of dependencies, one `-L` can change what any following `-l` flag means (and is pr…

I feel like pkg-config should really be returning a list of linkable libraries as files instead of using -L/-l, but I figure it is having to do the latter because of something with libtool and .la, right?

How much does libtool matter these days? AFAIK, distros `rm -rf %{_libdir}/*.la` without a care.