[debian-mysql] Bug#920365: mariadb_config: improve cross compilation support

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Sergei,

On Fri, Aug 16, 2019 at 05:41:14PM +0200, Sergei Golubchik wrote:
> Ok. Two thoughts. First, libmariadb comes with mariadb.pc pkg-config
> file. Does it have all you need to build? If not, we can, perhaps, add
> missing info to it.

The pkg-config part works great for cross compilation. There is nothing
you need to change here. It really just works. The problem is that not
everything uses pkg-config. Some downstreams prefer using mariadb_config
or more commonly mysql_config. Deprecating mysql_config and telling
everyone to use pkg-config could be part of a long-term solution and
I've done that to some packages (e.g. collectd, courier-authlib,
lighttpd, rsyslog, sphinxsearch, ulogd2), but that's a lot of effort to
get there.

One package that is particularly hard to convert to using pkg-config is
mysql-connector-c++. See
https://sources.debian.org/src/mysql-connector-c++/1.1.12-4/FindMySQL.cmake/.
Please try converting this to pkg-config.

> Second, binary mariadb_config does nothing else but printing a set of
> string. If there's no other choice, we could consider providing a shell
> script with the same functionality too.

Exactly. The script I attached to the bug submission converts
mariadb_config into a shell script that behaves exactly the same. You
point it at mariadb_config and you get back a shell script that behaves
exactly the same way. The major difference here is that the shell script
will work for cross compiling downstreams that happen to not use
pkg-config.

Helmut