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pkg-bee

Wouldn't it be cool if C libraries could be packaged and distributed like golang libraries? No? Oh well, here it is anyway. Enter pkg-bee!

Approach:

  • Create a new git repository for your library
  • Make a "Makefile" that does the right thing for "make" and "make clean"
  • Running "make" should produce a static archive of your objects (*.a)
  • Put a special package.pc file in the root directory
  • Push it somewhere (github I guess)

You can now run:

pkg-bee build https://github.com/kristov/gl-matrix

Which will:

  • Git clone https://github.com/kristov/gl-matrix into some location
  • Enter that directory and execute "make"

Then you use it like pkg-config in your compilation target:

target: target.c
    gcc -o target target.c $(pkg-bee --cflags --libs gl-matrix)

Which will execute pkg-config --cflags --libs <package_dir>/package.pc for that package.

Where is the build dir?

By default it is located in ${HOME}/build (it will not make that directory for you), or wherever the PKG_BEE_BUILD environment variable points to. So you can:

PKG_BEE_BUILD=./build pkg-bee build https://github.com/kristov/gl-matrix
PKG_BEE_BUILD=./build --cflags gl-matrix

For example.

pkg-bee build

In build mode pkg-bee downloads the source and executes make.

pkg-bee build <source>

Where <source> is assumed to be a git repository.

package.pc

This file should be in the same format as pkg-config expects, for example:

Name: gl-matrix
Description: Library for matrix calculations
Version: 0.1.0
Conflicts:
Libs: -L${pcfiledir} -l:gl-matrix.a
Cflags: -I${pcfiledir}

This will tell pkg-config where your archive file can be found and how to link it. You can also add any other dynamic link flags required for your package to work.

Why static?

There are several reasons why static linking is inferior to dynamic linking. For an interesting read see this debian wiki page on the topic. Still I find the toolchain is lacking something in the distribution of tiny libraries - perhaps why single-header libraries are a thing. Properly packaging dynamic libraries for distributions is not easy.

Gotchas

It's important to order the --libs correctly when compiling static archives. For example:

gcc $(pkg-bee --cflags --libs gl-matrix) -o target target.c

Will not work, whereas:

gcc -o target target.c $(pkg-bee --cflags --libs gl-matrix)

Should work. A good explanation can be found here.

Future

Probably no future. I will keep using this until I don't anymore.