Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 13 Feb 2007, at 03:19, Andrew Ruder wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 03:59:06AM +0100, Nicola Pero wrote:
> > And then adding an external dependency - which is a massive pain for
> > users, developers and maintainers - just to do the equivalent of  
> > 'echo
> > $CFLAGS' is somehow hardly attractive.
>
> An extra dependency here is not an issue, especially considering the
> widespread use of pkg-config.  I'm still scratching my head here
> figuring out why it is so often claimed an issue throughout this  
> thread
> when most people will already have this on their system.

An extra dependency most emphatically IS an issue ...  because the  
'people' you are referring to actually just means 'you', and you are  
just guessing about other users, and even assuming that 'most' is  
actually the case, then what you are proposing is to have something  
that only works for 'most', not for all.
Is your guess that 'most' is 55%, 70%, 95%?  At what point is the  
remaining 45%, 30%, 5% sufficiently small a minority that they become  
a non-issue?

GNUstep is supposed to be a cross-platform development system, and  
anyone who actually does cross platform development would hit a  
problem with pkg-config.
Dependency issues do not rule out using things (indeed, GNUstep has  
plenty of dependencies), but they are a big factor to consider, and  
only appear minor to the people they don't happen to effect, so when  
adding a dependency we need to be clear that what we are adding has  
overwhelming advantages over the alternatives.  While pkg-config is  
quite nice (and looking at it provides inspiration), it has no such  
advantages.