When using a tool like pkg-config (see here), how is one supposed to know what the library name should be? It is not always intuitive. DLIB, for example, doesn't work for
pkg-config --cflags dlibpkg-config --cflags libdlibpkg-config --cflags dlib-19.9I usually have to issue a command like sudo ldconfig -p | grep dlib, but all that does is return libdlib.so, which also doesn't work.
How do experts tackle this problem. Do they simply know all the library names?
It is called package name what you are using as a main parameter for pkg-config, and then applying --cflags or --libs, etc one just accesses the parameters specified and evaluated from the corresponding package config file ([some_package_name].pc, a.k.a pkg-config metadata file) that was found in pkg-config search paths.
And yes, there is no rule how package name relates to library name. Typically it's either library name without lib- prefix or just the whole library name. I found the following in pkg-config guide:
A common choice is to match the library name to the .pc name. For instance, a package installing libfoo.so would have a corresponding libfoo.pc file containing the pkg-config metadata. This choice is not necessary; the .pc file should simply be a unique identifier for your library. Following the above example, foo.pc or foolib.pc would probably work just as well.
However, you can list all available in pkg-config search paths and find out the correct names before using them in Makefile:
$ pkg-config --list-all | grep dlib