Deprecate sdl2-config and AM_PATH_SDL2 #6467
Merged
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If we deprecate these in SDL 2.x, then developers of dependent projects will have had some advance warning before they're removed in SDL 3 (which I think should only install
${libdir}/pkgconfig/sdl3.pc
and${libdir}/cmake/SDL3/*.cmake
, with no replacement for${bindir}/sdl2-config
or${datadir}/aclocal/sdl2.m4
).sdl2-config.in: Deprecate sdl2-config
Library-specific foo-config scripts duplicate very similar logic across
various different projects, and tend to break cross-compiling, multilib
(gcc -m32), Debian/Ubuntu multiarch and so on by only being able to have
one sdl2-config at a time as the first one in the PATH.
The direct replacement is pkg-config(1) or a compatible reimplementation
like pkgconf(1), which relies on each library installing declarative
metadata, like SDL's sdl2.pc (available since at least 2.0.0) and
centralizes the logic into the pkg-config/pkgconf tool.
Most uses of
sdl2-config --foo
can be replaced by something similarto
${PKG_CONFIG:-pkg-config} --foo sdl2
. Instead of adding a customsdl2-config to the PATH or using its --prefix or --exec-prefix options,
users of a custom installation prefix can use any of pkg-config's
non-SDL-specific ways to influence the result, for example setting
PKG_CONFIG_PATH, PKG_CONFIG_SYSROOT_DIR or PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR environment
variables, or setting the PKG_CONFIG environment variable to point to
a wrapper script.
For Autotools specifically, the replacement for AM_PATH_SDL2 (which
will be officially deprecated in a subsequent commit) is
PKG_CHECK_MODULES.
CMake has its own semi-declarative mechanism for dependency discovery,
"config packages", and the SDL build already installs a config
package. There's a good example of using a config package to discover
SDL in
cmake/test/
.Meson natively supports pkg-config, and already uses it in preference
to sdl2-config.
Other build systems can run pkg-config instead of sdl2-config,
preferably checking the PKG_CONFIG environment variable first.
https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3 is a good example of a project doing
this correctly.
Helps: Deprecate sdl2-config and AM_PATH_SDL2, at least on Unix #6140, On Windows, sdl2-config should be written in something other than bash #3516
sdl2.m4: Deprecate AM_PATH_SDL2 in favour of PKG_CHECK_MODULES
AM_PATH_SDL2 doesn't add much beyond PKG_CHECK_MODULES, and having a
special m4 macro for every library that you might depend on scales
poorly.
The macro does add special support for macOS frameworks, but that feature
was broken for around 6 years without anyone noticing (sdl2.m4 support for macOS frameworks probably broken #6141), and is
likely to be only rarely useful according to comments on sdl2.m4 support for macOS frameworks probably broken #6141.
Resolves: Deprecate sdl2-config and AM_PATH_SDL2, at least on Unix #6140
Existing Issue(s)
#6140