It's just not that simple to build userspace binaries that use lots of libraries [LWN.net]

It's just not that simple to build userspace binaries that use lots of libraries

Posted Mar 25, 2010 12:39 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955)
In reply to: It's just not that simple to build userspace binaries that use lots of libraries by ringerc
Parent article: KVM, QEMU, and kernel project management

You need a monster like autoconf or CMake to do the grunt work of locating the large variety of (mostly GUI-related) libraries...

These days most popular libraries support pkg-config which makes this a whole lot simpler.

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It's just not that simple to build userspace binaries that use lots of libraries

Posted Mar 26, 2010 3:32 UTC (Fri) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]

True, and pkg-config has come a long way lately with things like variable support and even msvc syntax handling. It doesn't help very much if you need to test for build options, though there's no reason why it *can't*. pkg-config's --variable feature would let you do build option tests ... but far too many packages fail to set appropriate .pc variables for important build options.

At least pkg-config makes version tests, cflags discovery, etc a whole lot easier.