Re: [Chicken-hackers] pkg-config support in chicken-install

[felix . winkelmann]

> Hi,
>
> Anybody up for hashing out a design for built-in pkg-config support in
> the egg infrastructure?
>
> I suggested this on Tuesday on the chicken-users list but didn't yet get
> any feedback. Preliminary thoughts at the bottom of this mail:
> <https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/chicken-users/2019-07/msg00029.html>.
> Vasilij Schneidermann was involved in the discussion and suggested we
> work on the openssl egg's install script, which led me to explore this
> problem, but it seems a more generic pkg-config solution could be fruitful.
>
> If the Chicken maintainers are interested in exploring this, I have some
> ideas for the details (not anything implemented and proven, just ideas
> for starters).
>

Hi, Lassi!

I appreciate your effort - you really have thought a lot about this.

Personally, I'm not overly keen on builtin support for any configuration
mechanism. Where will it end? What about Windows? What about other
tools that do similar things as pkg-config? Once we start this, there will be
no end to it (and I exaggerate only slightly...)

chicken-install is not a package manager. I understand that without
a solid configuration system it is very difficult to support smooth builds
in a language/library implementation that attempts to be portable across
a wide range of operating systems. But CHICKEN is first anf foremost a Scheme
implementation with the facility of basic library-management.
Installing Scheme-only libraries is usually effortless and that is enough,
in my very very humble opinion. In situations where it would be useful
to support quasi-generic, yet still OS-dependent components, I suggest
to do the configuration in Scheme as much as possible and assume
reasonable defaults, depending on platform. Yes, this is hard and not
without rough edge cases and even installation woes, I fully admit
that, but I see no acceptable solution that is generic, portable and
maintainable enough to be worth putting effiort into.


felix