Version 0.29.2-1 is the first release of xPack pkg-config.

The xPack pkg-config is a standalone cross-platform binary distribution of pkg-config.

There are separate binaries for macOS (x64 and arm64) and GNU/Linux (x64, arm64 and arm).

Download

The binary files are available from GitHub Releases.

Prerequisites

  • x64 GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • arm64/arm GNU/Linux: any system with GLIBC 2.27 or higher (like Raspberry Pi OS, Ubuntu 18 or later, Debian 10 or later, RedHat 8 or later, Fedora 29 or later, etc)
  • x64 macOS: 10.13 or later
  • arm64 macOS: 11.6 or later

Install

The full details of installing the xPack pkg-config on various platforms are presented in the separate Install page.

Easy install

The easiest way to install pkg-config is with xpm by using the binary xPack, available as @xpack-dev-tools/pkg-config from the npmjs.com registry.

With the xpm tool available, installing the latest version of the package and adding it as a dependency for a project is quite easy:

cd my-project
xpm init # Only at first use.

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/pkg-config@latest

ls -l xpacks/.bin

To install this specific version, use:

xpm install @xpack-dev-tools/pkg-config@0.29.2-1.1

It is also possible to install Meson Build globally, in the user home folder, but this requires xPack aware tools to automatically identify them and manage paths.

xpm install --global @xpack-dev-tools/pkg-config@latest --verbose

Uninstall

To remove the links created by xpm in the current project:

cd my-project

xpm uninstall @xpack-dev-tools/pkg-config

To completely remove the package from the central xPacks store:

xpm uninstall --global @xpack-dev-tools/pkg-config

Compliance

The xPack pkg-config generally follows the official pkg-config releases.

The current version is based on:

  • pkg-config version 0.29.2 from 2017-03-20.

Changes

Compared to the upstream version, there are no functional changes.

Bug fixes

  • none

Enhancements

  • none

Known problems

  • none

Shared libraries

On all platforms the packages are standalone, and expect only the standard runtime to be present on the host.

All dependencies that are build as shared libraries are copied locally in the libexec folder (or in the same folder as the executable for Windows).

DT_RPATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH

On GNU/Linux the binaries are adjusted to use a relative path:

$ readelf -d library.so | grep runpath
 0x000000000000001d (RPATH)            Library rpath: [$ORIGIN]

In the GNU ld.so search strategy, the DT_RPATH has the highest priority, higher than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, so if this later one is set in the environment, it should not interfere with the xPack binaries.

Please note that previous versions, up to mid-2020, used DT_RUNPATH, which has a priority lower than LD_LIBRARY_PATH, and does not tolerate setting it in the environment.

@rpath and @loader_path

Similarly, on macOS, the binaries are adjusted with install_name_tool to use a relative path.

Documentation

The original documentation is available online.

Build

The binaries for all supported platforms (Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux) were built using the xPack Build Box (XBB), a set of build environments based on slightly older distributions, that should be compatible with most recent systems.

The scripts used to build this distribution are in:

  • distro-info/scripts

For the prerequisites and more details on the build procedure, please see the README-MAINTAINER page.

CI tests

Before publishing, a set of simple tests were performed on an exhaustive set of platforms. The results are available from:

Tests

TBD

Checksums

The SHA-256 hashes for the files are:

64e411380f9b51271015573f32191657e5fec92106c84cbd08227b497a483882
xpack-pkg-config-0.29.2-1-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

9d998eaaa6328eb5aff985d83f90f15d89a1bfedab0e0c8e48b5ff6d87f64076
xpack-pkg-config-0.29.2-1-darwin-x64.tar.gz

09e3a3d8ed82bd0bfdebf0b4893cfafebe902f026872699676c7e267cabd60fe
xpack-pkg-config-0.29.2-1-linux-arm.tar.gz

92f8a608328af736cd84fccd316190af862b9354b960ac853a4fe2fabab72271
xpack-pkg-config-0.29.2-1-linux-arm64.tar.gz

066a6f55165c6cc6082c8dfabf9c5573938f680e71a125b874d7176557db2497
xpack-pkg-config-0.29.2-1-linux-x64.tar.gz

Deprecation notices

32-bit support

Support for 32-bit x86 GNU/Linux and x86 Windows was dropped in 2022. Support for 32-bit Arm GNU/Linux (armv7l) will be preserved for a while, due to the large user base of 32-bit Raspberry Pi systems.

GNU/Linux minimum requirements

Support for RedHat 7 was dropped in 2022 and the minimum requirement was raised to GLIBC 2.27, available starting with Ubuntu 18, Debian 10 and RedHat 8.

Download analytics

Credit to Shields IO for the badges and to Somsubhra/github-release-stats for the individual file counters.