pkg-config --exists fails but --list-all lists the package
 

I'm returning to linux after a several year hiatus and all is going more or less smoothly except for this one issue.

Running Debian Jessie on x64 with a few packages from stretch.

I'm trying to get pkg-config to recognize libgnomecanvas-2.0. Initially it didn't know about it at all, so I created a symlink:
jesse@anpanman-debian:~$ ls -l /usr/lib/pkgconfig/ | grep libgn
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 57 Jan 7 08:27 libgnomecanvas-2.0.pc -> /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/pkgconfig/libgnomecanvas-2.0.pc

This got it to be partially recognized, but --exists still refuses to acknowledge it:

$ pkg-config --exists libgnomecanvas-2.0
$ echo $?
1
$ pkg-config --modversion libgnomecanvas-2.0
2.30.3
$ pkg-config --list-all | grep libgnomecanvas-2.0
libgnomecanvas-2.0 libgnomecanvas-2.0 - libgnomecanvas
$ pkg-config --version
0.28


What am I missing to get --exists to acknowledge the package?

Did you try the "--print-errors" option? There could be a dependency problem. All of the information that you posted comes from the .pc file.

There's also PKG_CONFIG_DEBUG_SPEW. See the man page.

print-errors did show a dependency problem. I got myself into trouble trying to get cmake from the testing repos. I ended up paving the system and compiling cmake myself against stable. Turns out it works just fine and I don't run into tons of dependency hell like with testing.

Thanks for the pointer!