Bug 29801

Summary: pkg.m4:_PKG_CONFIG doesn't check the return code of "pkg-config --libs|--cflags"
Product: pkg-config Reporter: Diab Jerius <djerius>
Component: srcAssignee: Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: major    
Priority: medium CC: ernstp
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: Other   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:
Attachments: patch _PKG_CONFIG in pkg.m4

Description Diab Jerius 2010-08-25 08:40:36 UTC 
Created attachment 38142 [details] [review]
patch _PKG_CONFIG in pkg.m4

_PKG_CONFIG doesn't check the return results of "pkg-config --libs|--cflags" and thus fails to notice when "pkg-config --exists" succeeds, but "pkg-config --libs|--cflags" doesn't.  This can happen when a package exists but one of its dependencies doesn't.

I've modified the code (see attachment) to check the results.  Unfortunately this turned up another feature, namely that 'pkg-config --print-errors' doesn't pick the error, so the error message that iss dumped doesn't say anything about why the check failed.  

I removed the redirect to /dev/null in the call to pkg-config in _PKG_CONFIG in order to display the failure.  A bit of a kludge...
Comment 1 Dan Williams 2010-11-07 13:30:00 UTC 
Running into this too with jhbuild for GNOME.  jhbuild builds nspr 4.8.4 in private prefix, but does not build nss or nss-utils.  Instead, my local system has nss & nss-utils, which both require nspr >= 4.8.6.  So when building something inside jhbuild's prefix that wants NSS, the PKG_CHECK_MODULES(NSS, nss >= 3.11) succeeds but NSS_CFLAGS and NSS_LIBS is empty due to the dependency error:

[dcbw]$ pkg-config --exists --print-errors "nss >= 3.11"
[dcbw]$ echo $?
0
[dcbw]$ pkg-config --cflags --libs nss >= 3.11
Package 'NSS-UTIL' requires 'nspr >= 4.8.6' but version of NSPR is 4.8.4
[dcbw]$ echo $?
1

which makes me believe that the PKG_CHECK_MODULES should fail.
Comment 2 Ernst Sjöstrand 2010-12-28 17:16:44 UTC 
I hit this too today, seems like a good thing to fix.
Comment 3 Tollef Fog Heen 2011-05-15 05:10:27 UTC 
This has been fixed in git.

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