kc3-lang/pkgconf

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  • Hash : efdeb71d
    Author : Ingo Schwarze
    Date : 2025-06-04T21:09:13 

    man/pkgconf.1: improve the beginning of the DESCRIPTION

Replace the first paragraph with an adequate description of what the
program actually does, mention the main use case, and avoid vague
wordings like "helps to" and "allow" and misleading wordings like
"development libraries" (this is perfectly adequate for production
builds, too) and "detect" (nothing is automatically detected,
everything has to be specified explicitly in pc(5) configuration
files).

Add a second paragraph introducing the module search path
because that concept is really crucial for the program.

After that, add three paragraphs explaining the classification of
options, in particular how they behave with respect to early exit
and dependency resolution.  Admittedly, this requires rather lengthy
text, which is clearly undesirable at this place in a manual page.
But the atrocious user interface design only leaves the choice of
either bothering the reader with a long, complicated description,
or not describing how the program behaves at all.

Postponing the description of these interactions until after the
option list would not be better.  Understanding the classification
up front helps to understand the descriptions and purposes of the
individual options.

What is still sorely missing is a precise definition of what the
three different versions of the crucial term "dependency" mean,
and how resolution actually works.

  • README.md

  • pkgconf test

    pkgconf is a program which helps to configure compiler and linker flags for development libraries. It is a superset of the functionality provided by pkg-config from freedesktop.org, but does not provide bug-compatibility with the original pkg-config.

    libpkgconf is a library which provides access to most of pkgconf‘s functionality, to allow other tooling such as compilers and IDEs to discover and use libraries configured by pkgconf.

    release tarballs

    Release tarballs are available on distfiles.ariadne.space.

    build system setup

    If you would like to use the git sources directly, or a snapshot of the sources from GitHub, you will need to regenerate the autotools build system artifacts yourself, or use Meson instead. For example, on Alpine:

    $ apk add autoconf automake libtool build-base
$ sh ./autogen.sh

    pkgconf-lite

    If you only need the original pkg-config functionality, there is also pkgconf-lite, which builds the pkgconf frontend and relevant portions of libpkgconf functionality into a single binary:

    $ make -f Makefile.lite

    why pkgconf over original pkg-config?

    pkgconf builds a flattened directed dependency graph, which allows for more insight into relationships between dependencies, allowing for some link-time dependency optimization, which allows for the user to more conservatively link their binaries, which may be helpful in some environments, such as when prelink(1) is being used.

    The solver is also optimized to handle large dependency graphs with hundreds of thousands of edges, which can be seen in any project using the Abseil frameworks for example.

    In addition, pkgconf has full support for virtual packages, while the original pkg-config does not, as well as fully supporting Conflicts at dependency resolution time, which is more efficient than checking for Conflicts while walking the dependency graph.

    linker flags optimization

    pkgconf, when used effectively, can make optimizations to avoid overlinking binaries.

    This functionality depends on the pkg-config module properly declaring its dependency tree instead of using Libs and Cflags fields to directly link against other modules which have pkg-config metadata files installed.

    The practice of using Libs and Cflags to describe unrelated dependencies is not recommended in Dan Nicholson’s pkg-config tutorial for this reason.

    bug compatibility with original pkg-config

    In general, we do not provide bug-level compatibility with pkg-config.

    What that means is, if you feel that there is a legitimate regression versus pkg-config, do let us know, but also make sure that the .pc files are valid and follow the rules of the pkg-config tutorial, as most likely fixing them to follow the specified rules will solve the problem.

    debug output

    Please use only the stable interfaces to query pkg-config. Do not screen-scrape the output from --debug: this is sent to stderr for a reason, it is not intended to be scraped. The --debug output is not a stable interface, and should never be depended on as a source of information. If you need a stable interface to query pkg-config which is not covered, please get in touch.

    compiling pkgconf and libpkgconf on UNIX

    pkgconf is basically compiled the same way any other autotools-based project is compiled:

    $ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

    If you are installing pkgconf into a custom prefix, such as /opt/pkgconf, you will likely want to define the default system includedir and libdir for your toolchain. To do this, use the --with-system-includedir and --with-system-libdir configure flags like so:

    $ ./configure \
     --prefix=/opt/pkgconf \
     --with-system-libdir=/lib:/usr/lib \
     --with-system-includedir=/usr/include
$ make
$ sudo make install

    compiling pkgconf and libpkgconf with Meson (usually for Windows)

    pkgconf is compiled using Meson on Windows. In theory, you could also use Meson to build on UNIX, but this is not recommended at this time as pkgconf is typically built much earlier than Meson.

    $ meson setup build -Dtests=disabled
$ meson compile -C build
$ meson install -C build

    There are a few defines such as SYSTEM_LIBDIR, PKGCONFIGDIR and SYSTEM_INCLUDEDIR. However, on Windows, the default PKGCONFIGDIR value is usually overridden at runtime based on path relocation.

    pkg-config symlink

    If you want pkgconf to be used when you invoke pkg-config, you should install a symlink for this. We do not do this for you, as we believe it is better for vendors to make this determination themselves.

    $ ln -sf pkgconf /usr/bin/pkg-config

    contacts

    You can report bugs at https://github.com/pkgconf/pkgconf/issues.

    There is a mailing list at https://lists.sr.ht/~kaniini/pkgconf.

    You can contact us via IRC at #pkgconf at irc.oftc.net.

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