CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pkg-configmeson-buildenvironment-modules
tom
tom

Reputation: 413

combining pkg-config with module environment

This question may not make much sense if my understanding of both the pkg-config and environment modules is somewhat incorrect, but I'll ask anyways as I could not find anything specific on this topic. There might be an entirely better solution available, if that is the case, I am all ears!

I while back I started using modules to easily load my development environment as needed (i.e. using commands like module load foo etc.). More recently, I have adopted the meson build system for my projects. In meson, libraries are treated as dependencies, which are found using pkg-config in the background instead. So now I have two ways of discovering libraries and setting up their lib and include directory.

As an example, I have the following (simplified) module script for library foo (I am using lmod which is based on lua):

prepend_path("LD_LIBRARY_PATH", "/opt/foo/lib")
prepend_path("CPATH", "/opt/foo/include")

I could also have a pkg-config file (*.pc) doing something similar like (that is, if my understanding of pkg-config is correct)

prefix=/opt/foo
includedir=${prefix}/include
libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib

Name: foo
Cflags: -I${includedir}
Libs: -L${libdir} -lfoo

Now both seem to be doing pretty much the same thing (in terms of setting up my environment), but simply using modulefiles will not allow meson to find my dependencies and I still have to use pkg-config (which requires basically creating two files, either manually or dynamically, but that sounds like a maintenance burden and also not very clean). Equally, I could create the pkg-config file and add the location of that file into the PKG_CONFIG_PATH, i.e. something like

prepend_path("LD_LIBRARY_PATH", "/opt/foo/lib")
prepend_path("CPATH", "/opt/foo/include")
prepend_path("PKG_CONFIG_PATH", /path/to/*.pc/file)

but again this requires two files (pkg and module). I rather like the module environment and so don't want to ditch that, so is there a better / cleaner way of doing things, where I just load a module file which will allow pkg-config (and thus meson in turn) to know about the dependency?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 498

Answers (1)

Xavier Delaruelle
Xavier Delaruelle

Reputation: 848

As of today, there is no bridge between the environment module and the pkg-config tools. The best thing I think that could be achieved to keep the module system, is to have a script that queries every pkg-config files available and create the corresponding modulefile. And run that script regularly to keep things in sync.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions