Re: ANN: ncurses-6.2-20211016

[Milan P . Stanić]

On Mon, 2021-10-25 at 19:34, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 11:39:23PM +0200, Milan P. Stanić wrote:
> > 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 wrote that so I'd have the background established.
>  
> > I only asked if you have fix for installing .pc files in
> > $libdir/usr/lib/pkgconfig instead of root install dir.
> 
> I'm working to incorporate the additional information,
> expecting to complete the changes (and test-builds) tomorrow.

Thomas, with ncurses-6.3-20211026 release it builds and works fine on
Alpine linux.

Thank you for help.

Kind regards