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Comment by physicsguy | Hacker News Reader

pkg-config isn’t the hard bit though, is it?

Usually the hard bit with C libraries is having dependencies with dependencies all of which use their own complex build systems, a mix of Make, CMake, Autotools, Ninja, etc.

Then within that for e.g. a mix of using normal standard names for build parameters and not e.g. PROJECTNAME_COMPILER instead of CMAKE_C_COMPILER

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The package manager takes care of the dependencies. And one does not need to compile the libraries one uses, so how complicated this is does not matter. I install the -dev package and I am done. This works beautifully and where it does not the right move would be to fix this.

I think in most of my projects, many of the C++ packages I used for work (lots of computer vision, video codecs etc) I had to compile and host myself. The latest and greatest of OpenCV, dlib or e.g. gstreamer weren't available on the distros I was using (Ubuntu, Fedora, Centos). They'd lag a year or more behind sometimes. Some stuff was outright not available at all via package manager - in any version.

So, yes, you do have to figure out how to build and package these things by yourself very often. There are also no "leftpad" or similar packages in C. If you don't want to write something yourself.

In constrast - virtually every software package of any version is available to you in cargo or npm.

Virtually every package is in cargo and npm because there is no curation. This is exactly why it is a supply-chain risk. The fix is to have a curated list of packages, but this is what Linux distribution are. There is no easy way out.

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