Or to put it another way... does anyone here have a better understanding of pkg-config than I do? Here's the problem....

I tend to use the Windows convention of adding a "D" suffix to my Debug builds. So some_lib.lib/some_lib.dll will become some_libD.lib and some_libD.dll for my Debug builds. This all works fine as long as I build with Visual Studio.

But suppose I want to build using waf (which in turn, uses pkg-config). AFAICT pkg-config carries out certain tests to establish whether a project's dependencies are present or not. But once it finds a lib that matches its expectations it doesn't look any further. This means that when building a Debug version of your app, you'll often find that it has in fact linked to the Release versions of the dependent libraries. It's possible to solve the problem by placing Debug libraries and Release libraries in different folders but that introduces problems of its own.

I wanted to contact the pkg-config devs and suggest that when a Debug build is specified it should search (at least initially) for Debug versions of any dependent libraries - but is that even possible? Can such a utility test to see if a found library is the Debug version or the Release version?