Annoying and un-needed PKG_CHECK_EXISTS for *Magick
Submitted by Daniel Macks
Assigned to Jakub Steiner
Description
As far as I can tell, the only way tango-icon-theme uses imagemagick/graphicsmagick is via the 'convert' program supplied by either/both of them. That's an end-user program, typically in the "-bin" or some similar runtime package in most distros. However, configure.ac first checks for *Magick via pkg-config. It doesn't actually use any of the pkg-config data though--apparently this is just a proxy test for *magick existing, as a first-pass before actually checking for 'convert' (if no .pc, assumes no 'convert'; if .pc, checks explicitly/directly for 'convert'). The .pc files are usually packaged in a separate -dev package (headers and other compiler tools/data), which entails a substantial tree of other -dev packages (everything one would need to compile against the *Magick binary libraries).
If tango doesn't actually need any .pc data and already does do an explicit test for 'convert', why bother with the preliminary .pc test? You could save a bunch of build-time dependencies for tango if you omit it.
Version: CVS