Default search paths

[Olivier Boudeville]

Hi,

it must be a fairly usual question, but I did not find the final word
through the wiki or the mailing list archive.

It seems that, for a reason I cannot explain, /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
is not always hardcoded in pkg-config search paths, even after having
upgraded to newer versions (it is ok on Ubuntu [0.19] but not for Gentoo
[0.20] apparently).

I know that /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig may be specified by
PKG_CONFIG_PATH, but I would not trust most users to do so, as
pkg-config is merely a developer-tool. Would not it be better for
everyone if /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig was automatically searched ? One
strong reason for that is the autotools use /usr/local as default
prefix, so the installed *.pc cannot be found when building oneself some
less common tools.

If /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig was hardcoded (I guess it must comply with
the Linux Standard Base, with regard to the Filesystem Hierarchy
Standard ?), it may prevent some distros to mess with the shell
environment, if it is the problem here indeed ?

Regards,

Olivier Boudeville.