[Mingw-cross-env-list] SDL_image and SDL_mixer without pkg-config scripts in Debian (was: Difficulty building project using mingw-cross-env)

[Volker Grabsch]

David Bruce <address@hidden> schrieb:
> One question with respect to PKG_CONFIG* vs. AC_CHECK_LIB - since some
> of the libs we use don't support PKG_CONFIG* in Debian,

First of all, it means that we should report that nasty bug.
Since SDL_image and SDL_mixer already ship with *.pc scripts
and since these are installed on a plain "make install", I
don't see any reason why they shouldn't be part of the Debian
packages. Maybe their Debian maintains has a good reason for
that, but I don't think so.

However, I didn't yet find the time to report that bug.

Also, this bug exists for a long time, and reporting it now
wouldn't help Debian/Etch or Debian/Lenny users. It would
only help future releases of Debian - it wouldn't be a
solution for now.

> does this mean
> that we will need to have a parallel configure.ac for Debian-based
> developers to allow them to do autoreconf?

I'm not sure if that's a good solution. Maybe other distributions
have the same flaw. Also, this would be very counter-intuitive
to a normal Debian user (not maintainer) who just want's to build
that package from source.

Instead, I recommend to check whether the *.pc files of SDL_image
and SDL_mixer exist. If they, use them. If they don't, use the
AC_CHECK_LIB workaround.

    PKG_CHECK_EXISTS([SDL_image SDL_mixer],

        PKG_CHECK_MODULES([SDL_image SDL_mixer],

        AC_CHECK_LIB(SDL_image, ...)
        AC_CHECK_LIB(SDL_mixer, ...)
    )

I didn't actually try this, but it's the most elegant solution
I can currently think of.

The patch that I created goes another route: It uses your MinGW
detection and uses PKG_CHECK_MODULES() only for MinGW. This is
not very elegant, but required the least number of changes to
your configure.ac. So feel free to improve my patch. :-)


Greets,

    Volker

-- 
Volker Grabsch
---<<(())>>---
Administrator
NotJustHosting GbR