Re: pkg-config wisdom

[Matěj Týč]

On Mon, 2009-10-26 at 10:46 -0600, John Calcote wrote:
> Matěj,
> 
> On 10/25/2009 8:05 AM, Matěj Týč wrote:
> > There is one big issue with AC_SEARCH_LIBS: If you use a different
> > calling convention than cdecl (like stdcall, but I don't know, they've
> > just told me), you will get unresolved symbols if you try to link
> > without a proper include file (or something like that). Which means you
> > can't rely on that macro, especially when it concerns Windows libraries.
> > This is quite catastrophic, isn't it? What else than pkg-config would be
> >    
> 
> Is not this an issue with AC_CHECK_LIB also? I don't believe 
> AC_SEARCH_LIBS suffers any greater issues than AC_CHECK_LIB.

You are right, John, it is an issue.
But AFAIK most people usually just want to know whether the library
exists and can be linked to.
And you can use AC_CHECK_LIB([foo],[main]) to check for this.
However, you can't use AC_SEARCH_LIBS([main], [foo ...]) to find the
right lib - right in the somewhat limited sense - that you can link to
it.