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OS X - PKG_CONFIG_PATH results in empty pc_path, package not found

First off: I use OS X 10.10 Yosemite and I do everything from Terminal, no XCode IDE or other GUI involved. I installed pkg-config version 0.28 from Homebrew.

I want to build some software which depends on Ogre 1.8. I built and installed OGRE (via CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX) to a custom location in my home directory.

The layout is as follows: 

~/install/bin              contains binaries  
~/install/include          contains OGRE include headers  
~/install/lib              contains static libraries, e.g. libOgreMainStatic.a
~/install/lib/pkgconfig   contains *.pc files for Ogre, e.g. OGRE.pc

Before I add the path to PKG_CONFIG_PATH I get this:

$ pkg-config --variable pc_path OGRE
Package OGRE was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `OGRE.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
No package 'OGRE' found

This is expected behavior. I then added ~/install/lib/pkgconfig to my PKG_CONFIG_PATH like this:

$ export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=~/install/lib/pkgconfig
$ echo $PKG_CONFIG_PATH 
/Users/myusername/install/lib/pkgconfig

Running 

$ pkg-config --variable pc_path OGRE
  <empty line while I expected the path to OGRE.pc>

again only shows an empty line but no error message however.

When I now run CMake for the software I want to build it says:

$ cmake .
<snip>
-- checking for module 'OGRE'
--   package 'OGRE' not found

What am I doing wrong? On Linux it works with the same commands.

Solution

  • The problem was that OGRE.pc referenced Freetype and a few other requirements which I had built from source. While Ogre was able to find them since they were in the path set by CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX pkgconfig wasn't because they didn't provide *.pc files.

    I discovered this by using this command:

    Before fix:

    $ pkg-config --libs OGRE
Package zziplib was not found in the pkg-config search path.
Perhaps you should add the directory containing `zziplib.pc'
to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
Package 'zziplib', required by 'OGRE', not found

    After fix:

    $ pkg-config --libs OGRE
-L/Users/myusername/install/lib -L/Users/myusername/install/lib/OGRE -lOgreMainStatic -lpthread -lboost-thread-mt -lfreeimage