On Mon, Dec 06, 2010 at 02:57:59PM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote: > On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Roger Leigh <rle...@codelibre.net> wrote: > >> >> These are using proprietary vendor-specific #pragmas. It's pretty > >> > > >> > True, but IMO the concept seems pretty useful. > >> > > >> > Why do you think it's horrible? It appears to work well. > >> > > >> >> horrible, not to mention fragile--if any header fails to include the > >> >> correct bits of magic, it all falls apart. If they had spent just > >> >> a fraction of the time implementing that to support pkg-config, we > >> >> wouldn't have a problem. > >> > > >> > g++ and MSVC don't use pkg-config (AFAIK). > >> > So the complexity is pushed down instead of up. > > > Yes? I didn't really have anything further to add to the discussion, > > unless I've missed something. Were you wanting something specific? > > I was wondering why you considered the auto linking stuff to be so horrible. > IMO the best solution would be to get auto link support into GCC too.
It's non standard - it's not specified by ISO C - it's not specified by SUS/POSIX It's not portable - it uses vendor-specific #pragma magic It's fragile - every header must include the auto-link magic, either directly or indirectly. If you forget to do this just once in a single file, linking will break If it were incorporated into GCC, we still couldn't use it - it's not backward compatible with other UNIX compilers - it's not backward compatible with itself So we would always need an alternative mechanism for standards- conforming compilers which did not support this non-standard behaviour. Now, pkg-config isn't standardised /either/, but it's useful because it will work with any standards-conforming compiler. It's just a generalisation of existing practice (in the form of foo-config scripts generated during a package build). But this is all moot. I've written the pkg-config support into the auto-link header, and we just need to integrate it into the build system to get the job done. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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