Bug 57800

Summary:	Please prefer pkg-config over python-config
Product:	systemd	Reporter:	Michał Górny <mgorny>
Component:	general	Assignee:	systemd-bugs
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:	systemd-bugs
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	medium
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Michał Górny 2012-12-02 11:02:24 UTC

systemd recently started using python-config to detect python. This method is outdated and the modern way is to use pkg-config modules which are installed in python2.7+.

  $ pkg-config --cflags --libs python-2.7
  -I/usr/include/python2.7  -lpython2.7

Comment 1 Zbigniew Jedrzejewski-Szmek 2013-03-14 04:11:46 UTC

That would simplify a lot of things for us. But it seems to be only available from 2.7, but we support 2.6 now. I guess we could drop support for 2.6.

One advantage of python-config is that it is easy to go from python-config to python by simple string substitution. Let's say that I detect flags and libs for some python. How do I know which binary to call?

Comment 2 Michał Górny 2013-03-14 08:18:20 UTC

(In reply to comment #1)
> That would simplify a lot of things for us. But it seems to be only
> available from 2.7, but we support 2.6 now. I guess we could drop support
> for 2.6.

Well, as the summary states, I was suggesting using it and default and having a fallback to python-config. But either way's fine, I think.

> One advantage of python-config is that it is easy to go from python-config
> to python by simple string substitution. Let's say that I detect flags and
> libs for some python. How do I know which binary to call?

I'd say it's just another substitution. Since you would call:

  $ pkg-config --libs python-${PYTHON_VERSION}

You could just go for:

  python${PYTHON_VERSION}

However, I'm not sure where you would need that.

Comment 3 Zbigniew Jedrzejewski-Szmek 2013-07-26 15:32:30 UTC

Fixed in http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=a6c0b31d5.

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