Re: ANN: ncurses-6.2-20211016

[Milan P . Stanić]

On Mon, 2021-10-25 at 16:26, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 03:28:38PM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> ...
> > hmm - the drawback that I knew of was that it would pick the first directory
> > scanned (which isn't necessarily the one most often used).  Standardization
> > across pkg-config's always been very poor, so I've machines with all of the
> > choices being used by one package or another.
> > 
> > To recap, the current issue was begun by a report that the existing
> > (Debian-biased) predefined list of directories wasn't suitable.
> > 
> > The manual page mentions
> > 
> >        --variable=VARIABLENAME
> >               This  returns the value of a variable defined in a package's 
> > .pc
> >               file. Most packages define the variable "prefix",  for  
> > example,
> >               so you can say:
> >                 $ pkg-config --variable=prefix glib-2.0
> >                 /usr/
> > 
> > and I overlooked its usefulness for the task (because the manual page 
> > doesn't
> > point out the relationship between "pc_path", PKG_CONFIG_PATH and
> > PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR (actually reading the source code is needed to see the
> > distinction between the latter two):
> > 
> >        pc_path
> >               The default search path used by pkg-config  when  searching  
> > for
> >               .pc files. This can be used in a query for the pkg-config 
> > module
> >               itself itself:
> >                 $ pkg-config --variable pc_path pkg-config
> > 
> > Using "pkg-config --variable=pc_path" gives me this:
> > 
> > /usr/local/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/local/share/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig:/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig
> > 
> > which needs some work to make it usable when developing a package.
> > 
> > (I did read about "pkgconf" while working on the macro -- because I tested 
> > it
> > with the BSDs which generally don't use pkg-config -- and the point was
> > made in _its_ documentation that one should not actually count on it being
> > compatible in fine details).
> > 
> > fwiw, I test with machines older than 15 years as well...
> 
> for instance, this doesn't work on my Solaris10 machine (0.15.0),
> so my configure script will have to check for availability of the feature.
> 
> Checking for when this feature was available in this form,
> pkg-config's git log says it was added here:
> 
> commit e170895bc6241e933c6c6e85dc800fef5ed44615                               
>   
> Author: Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>                                       
>   
> Date:   Mon Mar 30 21:17:43 2009 +0200                                        
>   
>                                                                               
>   
>     2009-03-30  Tollef Fog Heen  <tfheen@err.no>                              
>   
>                                                                               
>   
>             * pkg.c (add_virtual_pkgconfig_package): Add pc_path as a 
> variable  
>             which you can use to get at the compiled-in PKG_CONFIG_PC_PATH.
> 
> which (for the upstream) makes it a little over 12 years.
> For real use, I'd have to subtract a couple of years.
> 
> For pkgconf, it's a different story:
> 
> commit 7d89f659ffa45d381c3c4ee03c55f74635042829                               
>   
> Author: Baptiste Daroussin <bapt@FreeBSD.org>                                 
>   
> Date:   Sun Jan 22 10:44:09 2017 +0100                                        
>   
>                                                                               
>   
>     Fix regression introduced in 7b39c38                                      
>   
>                                                                               
>   
>     now pkgconf --variable=pc_path pkg-config works
> 
> The feature itself was added here (9 years ago):
> 
> commit 111046f100a1a63b125494406351ce72a1a486bf                               
>   
> Author: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>                             
>   
> Date:   Sun Jul 22 23:16:39 2012 -0500                                        
>   
>                                                                               
>   
>     pkg: add support for $(pc_path) variable for extracting PKG_DEFAULT_PATH
> 
> But this isn't the pkgconf bug reporting list; further discussion
> of that aspect is off-topic.

Thomas, I understand this and I also don't like to discuss what is
happened years ago and why.

I only asked if you have fix for installing .pc files in
$libdir/usr/lib/pkgconfig instead of root install dir.

-- 
Kind regards