I just released pkg-config 0.18 which fixes some annoying bugs in earlier versions. One is the support for PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR which was erronously removed. Another change is the removal of some memory leaks. Those are just small bugs which are fixed though. There are a few real changes in there as well:

• pkg.m4 now has a PKG_CHECK_EXISTS macro to just check whether dependencies are fulfilled or not.
• PKG_CHECK_MODULES no longer caches. This fixes lots of problems people stumbled into and I’m not sure why caching was added in the first place.

The last and biggest change is the handling of private libraries. Private libraries are any libraries your library or application uses, but which are not exposed in the API. They are needed for static linking, but otherwise should just be taken care of by inter-library dependencies. Examples of private dependencies are Cairo’s use of libpng and a library needing libm. An example of a public dependency is GTK+ exposing the GLib api.

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