Hey Benjamin, good that you mention “creativity” and Mozilla in the same blog post.
I’m sure the people at Mozilla and the distributions have a slightly better solution to this current situation of having to do funny things in your configure.ac to figure absurd things out. Things like having to search which of the Mozilla development packages are available: a developer can choose between nss.pc, mozilla-nss.pc, firefox-nss.pc and xulrunner-nss.pc. I’m sure there are a few more too. Like nspr.pc, mozilla-nspr.pc, firefox-nspr.pc and xulrunner-nspr. And like xpcom.pc, mozilla-xpcom.pc, firefox-xpcom.pc and xulrunner-xpcom.pc. And of course also gtkmozembed.pc, mozilla-gtkmozembed.pc, firefox-gtkmozembed.pc and xulrunner-gtkmozembed. Just to make sure our configure.acs will be bloated like crap just for figuring out what the system actually has installed for those libraries.
I wonder what the use of pkg-config is if everybody starts doing that, Mozilla team?
For some fun reason they also decided to have -rpath in some of their “Libs: ” lines too. Making it totally fun for the maintainer to figure out why certain symbols can’t be found in a lot of circumstances (like when you used to have a function that was static, and now became a non-static, those rpath tricks will trick your linker into trying to use the installed libraries that are located in the prefix location if you once did a “make install”).
Awesome things if you don’t know that and expect sanity from pkg-config configuration files.