Support for pkgconfig

[Mike Hearn]

> No, I'm not kidding nor drinking. WIND has nothing to do with copying
> the XP UI. As I was explaining in my message, we can have our UI look
> like BlueCurve or what have you. 

I'm not really sure what it is then, a desktop based on Wine? Why would
that be better than a desktop based on Qt or GTK?

> WIND is all about the API. And yeah,
> the Windows API is not perfect, but there's no perfect API. And thing
> is, 99% of programmers out there know Win32, not GKT+. 

Not sure about that. I did many years of Windows programming before
using Linux, but it was with Delphi. I'd guess most programmers know
MFC, Visual Basic, Delphi/VCL and now .NET rather than the raw Win32
APIs.

> And I think the Win32 API is not that bad that it should be dropped, 
> given the investment level that the human race has put into it. 

Hmm, that's an interesting idea. More a matter of philosophy though.

Well, part of the problem is that it's really Microsoft, not the human
race, that has invested in it, everybody else was essentially forced to
use it. I doubt we'll see the last line of Win32 for a long, long time,
which is why Wine is so necessary. I'm not sure that's a valid reason to
continue using it though. If the human race has invested in anything,
it'd be the open source toolkits and APIs built mostly by volunteers.

> Quite frankly, I think the Win32 API is not that bad for UI tasks, it
> certainly proved to work OK for so many years. 

Well I'd guess a lot of, if not most apps use wrapper libraries because
Win32 is so painful on its own.

> And if you want to talk about ugly, you should 
> start with GTK, not Wine :) Not to mention the fact that I think our 
> widgets are better, more polished, and I think more featureful.

I personally found GTK2 to be a much saner API than Win32 - the mess
over dialog vs window procedures just made me laugh out loud when
Alexandre explained it. It has fewer features at the moment yes, but
then it's much younger. It'll get them in time. Plus of course some
design decisions in GTK are much better - signals, GObject API,
containment based layout etc. Plus of course it has standardised
bindings to many languages, unlike the Win32 API which can appear in
many different forms depending on what IDE you use.

> But the big thing is that we'll have better binary compatibility than
> glibc had, a programming API known to *many* people, and a large set
> of apps aldready written. Look at SF, you'll see that the top downloads 
> are by a huge margin apps that run on Windows.

Sure, but Wine the binary emulation service works no matter what desktop
it's in, I don't understand what the benefits of having a desktop built
on top of it would be.

-- 
Mike Hearn <m.hearn at signal.qinetiq.com>
QinetiQ - Malvern Technology Center