[fpc-devel] gtk1 linklib directive under FreeBSD

[Marco van de Voort]

> 
> On 9 mei 2006, at 11:21, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> 
> > FreeBSD, when confronted with this says to use pkgconfig, and  
> > doesn't want
> > to help out with a couple of symlinks to ease the situation. IOW  
> > they don't
> > care about anything but GCC.
> 
> This symlink/library practice on linux/unix is simply a mess, and I  
> personally also don't see another portable way but to use tools such  
> as pkgconfig and friends.

I'm afraid that that will open a whole can of other slight incompabilities,
path problems etc. Moreover it doesn't help us to tackle problems _after_
deployment. 

But the main difference with GCC is that gcc can link precompiled stuff
(e.g. -devel libs), and only decides about lib names on the point of
linking. We have library names hardcoded in the .ppu's.

A simple solution would be to regard the linklib statement as an alias, that
can be replaced with a different name somewhere else. In that case, a
distribution maintainer can relatively simple add some config options to
e.g. alias gtk to gtk12 or libdl to libc etc.

Even if we get pkgconfig working, if something is wrong, pkgconfig gets a
new version etc etc, we can only say "wait till the next version", or must
create emergency fixes for releases already in the wild. (FPC version
2.0.4sp1 ? :-)

I don't say that pkgconfig shouldn't be done, but I think the main problem
that must be fixed is the hardcoding of library names in the .ppu