possible idea: GNUstep and pkg-config?

[Andrew Sveikauskas]

Hi,

I'm curious to know what people think of this idea.  I made a quick 
hack that generates pkg-config .pc files for GNUstep base and gui:

http://mail.rochester.edu/~asveikau/gnustep-pkg-config.tar.gz

This is obviously not meant to replace GNUstep make, rather provide a 
quick way to compile and link GNUstep programs on the command line 
without the makefile package:

$ gcc -c -o foo.o foo.m `pkg-config --cflags gnustep-gui`
$ gcc -o foo foo.o `pkg-config --libs gnustep-gui`

My original thinking was that this would be useful for a program which 
has frontends for several windowing toolkits and is not 
GNUstep-specific.  Let's say I wanted to write a GNUstep-based mplayer 
output driver, just as an example.  mplayer already has lots of 
configure scripts and makefile stuff, and (1) it would be a bad idea 
to make mplayer require GNUstep make on all platforms/toolkits, and 
(2) GNUstep make might not "fit in" with some of the other build 
scripts.  So, in this example, the configure script could use 
pkg-config to check if GNUstep is there, and then get the objcflags 
and libs that way.  (Though sure, this is not the only way to do such 
a thing.)

But I guess this thing might have other benefits.  On this system, the 
output of pkg-config --cflags gnustep-base:

-fPIC -DGSWARN -DGSDIAGNOSE -O2 -pipe -fgnu-runtime 
-fconstant-string-class=NSConstantString -I. -I/usr/local/include 
-IGNUstep/Library/Headers -I/usr/local/GNUstep/Local/Library/Headers 
-I/usr/local/GNUstep/Network/Library/Headers 
-I/usr/local/GNUstep/System/Library/Headers

Which is quite a lot to type.  If I want to write quick throwaway 
dummy code to test some objc snippet, that would be a pain to include 
every time, as would bothering to write a makefile.  This might be 
convenient for such a purpose.

So I've tested this a little bit on OpenBSD, Linux, and Mac OS with 
Cocoa.  Seems to work.  What do people think?  Good idea, bad idea?

Andrew