How to generate .pc files from package files?

[Larry Evans]

I'm trying to install gnucash from source and during configure
I get messages including:

checking if (www main) is available... no
checking for gconf-2.0 >= "2.0"... Package gconf-2.0 was not found in 
the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory 
containing `gconf-2.0.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable No 
package 'gconf-2.0' found
configure: error: Library requirements (gconf-2.0 >= "2.0") not met; 
consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if your 
libraries are in a nonstandard prefix so pkg-config can find them.

However:

   /var/lib/dpkg/available

contains:

Package: gconf2
Priority: optional
Section: libs
Installed-Size: 224
Maintainer: Josselin Mouette <joss at debian.org>
Architecture: i386
Version: 2.14.0-1
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.3.5-1), libgconf2-4 (>= 2.13.5), libglib2.0-0 (>= 
2.10.0), libpopt0 (>= 1.7), libxml2 (>= 2.6.23), gconf2-common (= 
2.14.0-1), psmisc, python (>= 2.3), python (<< 3)
Recommends: libgtk2.0-0
Conflicts: libgconf2-4 (<< 2.12.0-2)
Filename: pool/main/g/gconf2/gconf2_2.6.4-2_i386.deb

...so, I was wondering if there was some way to generate the needed
gconf-2.0.pc file from the information in the /var/lib/dpkg/available
file?  I tried guessing the information by manually editing
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/gconf-2.0.pc to contain:

Name: GConf-2.0
Description: GNOME configuration database system (support tools)
Version: 2.14.0

That silenced the configure error message, but that seems too error
prone.  Should there be an automated way to do this?

TIA.

-Larry