Proposal to do native deps using pkg-config

[o11c]

On Linux, the state-of-the-art mechanism for linking to native libraries is pkg-config, replacing decades of hard-coding. On other platforms, there is no solution easier than using pkg-config, although it is most likely not installed by default there.

pkg-config supports both static and dynamic linking, although there are a lot of in-the-wild .pc files that don't support static linking properly.

Here's an example of using pkg-config in a (currently non-Cargo) Rust project, including the "rpath" step for libraries installed in non-system directories: https://github.com/o11c/termkey-rs/blob/master/Makefile

[wycats]

Can you use the build = configuration in the Cargo.toml to use pkg-config?