I have been installing packages, and /usr/bin/pkg-config seemingly doing everything it was supposed to. Yesterday, I found that /usr/bin/pkg-config was not working for a situation where some software had been installed in /usr/local. The version of pkg-config installed was dev-util/pkgconfig. An upstream author mentioned something about PKG_CONFIG_PATH, as did the man page for pkg-config. And while having PKG_CONFIG_PATH defined did result in some changes in how a program behaved, it did not result in being able to install a second package which depended on the the first package. I then tried installing dev-util/pkgconf. This install removed the old dev-util/pkgconfig. It behaved the same way. I then uninstalled dev-util/pkgconf, and installed dev-util/pkgconfig-openbsd. Which behaved the same as the other 2 versions. But, because /usr/bin/pkg-config for the openbsd version is a perl script, it was trivial for me to prepend /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig to the list of 2 directories that pkgconfig was searching. And at this point, the /usr/bin/pkg-config program worked the way it was supposed to. Somebody not associated with dev/util/pkgconfig-openbsd declared my bug report invalid. Thinking about things, all that makes sense is that Gentoo is deliberately altering upstream development packages, so that they won't work with /usr/local. This seems a rather strange thing to do, and maybe I am just mis-interpreting things because I have autism. There has been lots of times under other versions of linux, where I am trying to help someone else install an involved package, and installing into /usr/local is the most logical thing to do. I'll stop here, I have a tendency to ramble on.
Do you have a link to let us see that bug that was closed as INVALID? Also, looking to dev-util/pkgconfig I haven't noticed any patch or option to drop change /usr/local behavior, but you can double check it of course looking to ebuilds+patches that are there
Unless this turns out to have a few "special" circumstances, it won't belong to ComRel. I'm opening it as there's no reason for it to be closed and leaving the product until we can determine where best to put it.
