Re: generating pc files

[Peter Johansson]

On 09/19/2012 05:53 PM, Vincent Torri wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 19, 2012 at 9:46 AM, Russ Allbery<address@hidden>  wrote:
> > Vincent Torri<address@hidden>  writes:
> >
> > > But it seems that several projects use sed in their Makefile.am to use
> > > the value of $libdir, $includedir, etc.. to generate their pc files. So
> > > they have in foo.pc
> > > libdir=${libdir}
> > > So I would like to know the opinion of the autoconf dev about what the
> > > correct way to generate pc file is.
> > Well, I'm not an Autoconf developer, so feel free to ignore this, but I've
> > been very happy with the following recipe.  A *.pc.in file that looks
> > like:
> >
> >      address@hidden@
> >      address@hidden@
> >      address@hidden@
> >      address@hidden@
> >
> >      Name:<name>
> >      Description:<description>
> >      URL:<url>
> >      Version: @PACKAGE_VERSION@
> >      Cflags: -I${includedir}
> >      Libs: -L${libdir} -l<library>
> >      Libs.private:<other-libs>
> >
> > with the<...>  bits replaced with whatever is appropriate for your
> > library, and then the following in Makefile.am (adjusting file paths
> > accordingly, of course:
> >
> > client/libremctl.pc: $(srcdir)/client/libremctl.pc.in
> >          sed -e 'address@hidden@]!$(prefix)!g'                     \
> >              -e 'address@hidden@]!$(exec_prefix)!g'           \
> >              -e 'address@hidden@]!$(includedir)!g'             \
> >              -e 'address@hidden@]!$(libdir)!g'                     \
> >              -e 'address@hidden@]!$(PACKAGE_VERSION)!g'   \
> >              -e 'address@hidden@]!$(GSSAPI_LDFLAGS)!g'     \
> >              -e 'address@hidden@]!$(GSSAPI_LIBS)!g'           \
> >              $(srcdir)/client/libremctl.pc.in>  $@
> I know that way. I mentioned it (" But it seems that several projects
> use sed in their Makefile.am etc..." See above)
>
> My question is : which solution is the correct one, as they obviously
> don't give the same result ?
The major difference compared with using AC_CONFIG_FILES is that the sed 
version allows user to set e.g. prefix at make time.

./configure
make prefix=/opt

will work for Russ's method while it won't work using a simpler 
AC_CONFIG_FILES approach. Not sure how important that behavior is for 
you. But I if you care about GCS, I think the behavior is mandated there.

Cheers,
Peter