[PATCH] Make krb5-config suppress CFLAGS output and omit extra libraries when called with --libs

[Russ Allbery]

Greg Hudson <ghudson at mit.edu> writes:

> This is more complicated.  First, is do_deps an established convention?
> pkg-config uses the --static flag to decide whether to output dependency
> libraries (on the theory that you need them for static linking but not
> shared linking).

curl-config uses --static-libs as the flag to get this information.

I think at this point including all the internal dependencies is only
needed for static linking.  I'm not certain that's true across all of the
stranger platforms (like HP-UX or AIX), but I suspect it is.  I would
therefore omit all the internal dependencies except to the degree that one
is supporting static linking.

> Third, the provided patch only omits external dependencies, not internal
> ones (or com_err).  An app using only GSSAPI functions should depend
> only on libgssapi_krb5, not on libkrb5 and libk5crypto.  However, it's
> likely that apps have come to expect the current behavior--especially as
> we don't appear to properly support things like "krb5-config --libs
> gssapi krb5".  So, this problem may be intractable.

I think you should go ahead and break clients that use krb5-config --libs
gssapi and then expect to have Kerberos symbols available.  The interface
is pretty clearly defined ("GSSAPI application with Kerberos 5 bindings"),
and clients should be running both krb5-config --libs gssapi and
krb5-config --libs krb5 and combining them.  (That's what my applications
that need both already do.)  There may be some build system breakage for
people who did the wrong thing, but it's a lot cleaner as an interface.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>