libpkg-config

The libpkg-config library provides a C API for retrieving C-language family compiler/linker flags and other metadata from pkg-config files (.pc). It's primarily aimed at build system and other similar tools (see the recommended usage below).

This library is a fork of libpkgconf from the pkgconf project. The fork was motivated by the poor quality of changes in general (see these three commits for a representative example: 0253fdd c613eb5 ab404bc) and disregard for backwards compatibility in particular (for example, sr.ht/18). While we have removed a large amount of non-essential functionality and "innovations" as well as spend some time fixing and cleaning things up, make no mistake it is still an over-engineered, inscrutable mess and there likely are bugs in the corner cases. However, we do use it in build2, which means at least the recommended usage patterns (see below) are reasonably well tested. We hope to continue cleaning things up as time permits but a complete rewrite is also on the cards (in which case it will most likely become a C++ library).