requirements for native gems not free text?

[Hugh Sasse]

On Wed, 30 Jan 2013, Jordi Massaguer Pla wrote:

> Quoting Gary Weaver <garysweaver at gmail.com>:
> 
> > On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 10:12 PM, James Tucker <jftucker at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Right now, this can all be done, and is done, in extconf. It's more
> > > portable than writing specific native code for each linker and loader, as
> > > it just uses the platform build tools to perform assertions. Problematic
> > > and inefficient as they may be, autotools work this way for this same
> > > reason. Maybe today we have few enough supported platforms that it's
> > > viable
> > > to write code that links the linkers, without a totally horrific
> > > combinatorial explosion of native code, but later, not so much.
> > > 
> > 
> > But extconf.rb/mkmf is meant for C-extension building isn't it? I got the
> > impression that the requirement was that they just wanted to see what
> > version of a library was loaded.
> > 
> > 
> 
> The requirement was to know about library dependencies before building the
> native extension. Thus, you can not use tools like ldd because the native
> library has not yet been compiled...

Claiming almost no expertise here (I've used it once):
pkg-config is supposed to solve this, I think, and seems to be
cross-platform.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkg-config

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config

It is used by autotools.
http://www.flameeyes.eu/autotools-mythbuster/pkgconfig/index.html

It is GPL. Licensing debates may ensue...

        HTH
        Hugh