Acceptance of pkg-config and .pc files

[Дилян Палаузов]

Hello,

the subject might be misleading, but I did not come to a better idea.

I know it is up to every distribution to distribute or not the .pc 
files, but compiling the software yourself, you have to rely on some 
mechanism to figure out the information pkg-config delivers.  If 
pkg-config is not installed on every modern system, then one has to 
maintain workarounds for finding how to link.

When does it make sense to have workarounds for missing .pc files, and 
when are these workarounds pointless, as .pc files and pkg-config are 
always provided?

Let's take an example: gnutls and opendkim.  The latter checks at 
./configure time if gnutls' pkg-config is installed and if it cannot 
find it, then it tries other ways.  What is the chance, that 
gnutls(-devel) is installed, but gnutls.pc is not found (provided that 
./configure insists that pkg-config must be installed)?  Do you have any 
experience, or even a link, where this information is presented?

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Kind regards
   Dilyan Palauzov