Libtool and Pkg-Config

[Eric Lemings]

Because of a growing number of config scripts for packages in GNOME 1.2
(e.g. glib-config, xml-config, orbit-config. etc), development of GNOME
2.0 spawned a separate tool called pkg-config that allows all packages
to use one tool rather than several different scripts to query compile
flags, link flags, and other configuration data.

The functionality of pkg-config seems to me to have a lot of overlap
with the goals of libtool.  I was wondering if anyone had considered
adding an eighth mode to libtool that just queries the installed
library for the same information that pkg-config provides.  Since
most packages that use pkg-config also use libtool, I think this
would be a good way to reduce maintainer and developer dependencies.

Thanks,
Eric.