Re: GTK build crashes under X

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:10:23 +0100
> From: =?UTF-8?B?SmFuIERqw6Rydg==?= <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> When building for Gtk, Emacs uses the libs given by pkg-config.  You can not 
> override it easily.  I guess you have to do configure the normal way, and 
> then 
> edit src/Makefile and put in your fontconfig library there.

Btw, this pkg-config thingy is a terrible nuisance.  I recently had to
build some package on a RH box, and was amazed to find that all the
``usual'' tricks of getting `configure' to use non-default include and
library paths simply don't work, because that package's `configure'
script used pkg-config to find all the headers and libraries, and as
you say above, what pkg-config returns cannot be overridden easily.
For example, "LDFLAGS=-L/whatever ./configure" cannot override the
places where the linker run by `configure' looks for libraries.  This
means, for example, that if you are an underprivileged user who
installs packages and libraries under ~/, you have no hope of getting
the compiler and the linker to use headers and libraries in those
private directories, since pkg-config doesn't know about them and
keeps pointing the build process to the public directories.

(If there's a reasonable way of working around this, please let me
know.)

I hope Emacs will _never_ use pkg-config for anything serious, because
otherwise I will be at the mercy of the sysadmins on too many systems
I work on, where I cannot become a superuser and "make install" the
optional image libraries needed by Emacs.  (Also, most of the Emacs
INSTALL file will become incorrect if we ever start using pkg-config,
and even now the GTK build is already hit by this problem.)

Why in the world would GNU/Linux developers wish to use such a
restrictive tool?  Do they somehow miss the non-freedom of MS-Windows?