Subject: guile-config deprecation?
From: Mike Gran <[email-masked]>
To: Bug Guile <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:42:14 -0800 (PST)
List-Id: <debbugs-submit.debbugs.gnu.org>

Hi-

There's a bit of confusion on the guile-config deprecation.

NEWS says that guile-config "will be deprecated"

meta/guile-config.in says it "has been deprecated"

meta/guile.m4's GUILE_PROGS rule will error "guile-config required
but not found"

likewise those rules that depend on GUILE_PROGS, such as GUILE_FLAGS
and GUILE_SITE_DIR

In the manual, in the "parallel installations" section, it implies
that GUILE_SITE_DIR is the way to get the sitedir from pkg-config,
but with guile.m4, it is getting that information via guile-config,
which itself gets it from pkg-config.

In the README, it suggests "guile-config" is the way to get the
sitedir for the installation of slib.

The man page for pkg-config describes the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro,
but doesn't give any indication of how to set up any autoconf
flags beyond _CFLAGS and _LIBS.  So it isn't clear that PKG_CHECK_MODULES
could be used as a replacement for GUILE_SITE_DIR.

It seems to me, that there is some inconsistency here.  I'm worried
that guile-config will just disappear with no equally powerful,
documented replacement in place.

The quickest fix would be to not deprecated it, while
maybe creating and documenting a parallel set of pkg-config based

macros in guile.m4 for extracting things like sitedir.

Thanks,

Mike