Coffee|Code : Dan Scott

The next time you bash your brains against autotools for a while wondering why your perfectly good PKG_CHECK_MODULES() macro, as cut and paste directly from the recommended configure.ac entry for the package you're trying to integrate (in this case libmemcached), and you get the error message PKG_CHECK_MODULES syntax error near unexpected token `DEPS,' on one system and not on another, it's probably because you're missing the pkg-config package on the failing system.

It would be nice if the error message gave you a clue, but it doesn't and probably can't, because the macro simply doesn't exist until the package is installed. So I'm telling you. Go forth and code now that that irritation is gone.

C# isn't in my go-to list of programming languages, but I can understand why others would be interested in developing applications in C#. So it's good news to the C# community of library developers (it would be interesting to find out how many of you are out there) that there is now a library available for parsing and manipulating MARC records for the C# language. From the CSharp MARC homepage:

C# class structures for reading and manipulating Library of Congress MARC records using the MARC21 standard. Based upon the PHP Pear package File_MARC (http://pear.php.net/package/File_MARC) by Dan Scott

Congratulations to Matt Schraeder on the release and good luck with MARC! And thanks for the shout-out, that was very kind of you.