On Tue, 24 Aug 2004, Todd Fisher wrote:

>> When is this useful?
>
> The idea is very useful for people that use Makefiles, specifically with GNU
> Make, cygwin makes this possible in win32 hence the ability to use cl with a
> gnu makefile. Mozilla does this for example.

How will you figure out what libs you need to link with libcurl? How can you
figure out if you build libcurl with MSVC to use libz or not? To use openssl
or not?

You would need to make a curl-config for MSVC that assumes a whole lot and
thus will fail for those that doesn't do exactly like the majority does, since
you cannot have the curl-config generated according to the choices set at
build time, as it is on configure-based installs.

> I can see that since curl-config is generated by running the configure
> script this type of logic would not be needed in the curl-config script.

Right, the logic is in configure, the results are in the curl-config script.

> However, that limits the compiled libraries to only being used by the said
> compiler.

I don't understand this remark.

> However, if curl-config checked the environment and returned the correct
> flags for either gcc or cl then this could be more flexible.

  How would it check the environment? If you run windows, you have a large
amount of compilers available. You can have several ones installed. How can
the script know what compiler you want to use? The script would need one (or
more) special command line option that would return info for the specific
compiler you want to use.

  Then, how can the script tell you what libs you need to link with in order to
make a fine build? Your patch assumed "libcurl.lib gdi32.lib libz.lib". What
if the lib was built with SSL support? Then it needs two more libs. What if
the lib was built without zlib support? Then the libz lib shouldn't be
there...

> Since, I can generate .lib's and .a's for both compilers why not have a
> single curl-config that works with both too.

"both" ?

> I agree with your point that most windows people don't use the command line,

That is not quite my point. Many people use the command line on windows,
especially when building libcurl from source. But I doubt even a very small
fraction of those people would even consider running a shell script to figure
out the link options to use when linking with libcurl.

Only people using cygwin would do that. And cygwin already supports the
configure-style build which makes the whole argument moot.

> does that really mean it should just be ignored entirely?

No. If you can provide a curl-config file that *works* on windows, then I
won't reject the idea. Hard-coding the output from curl-config is just not a
solution I like.

> Perhaps, just adding support in libcurl for a libcurl.pc file would solve
> this issue for me.

It might. I know very little of pkg-config and I have very little experience
from it so I'm not able to discuss details at this point.

-- 
      Daniel Stenberg -- http://curl.haxx.se -- http://daniel.haxx.se
       Dedicated custom curl help for hire: http://haxx.se/curl.html