pkg-config is looking into /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig even with PKG_CONFIG_PATH set to another location

Question

I'm using pkg-config to cross compile a project to MIPS platform. As usual, I'm setting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH var to the target's platform suitable directory (in this case something like /usr/local/mips_sdk/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig, but it doesn't matter).

Strange is that pkg-config is using .pc files from /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig when they are not found in the path pointed by PKG_CONFIG_PATH var. It is like /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig is hardcoded in the search path of pkg-config.

It feels a little strange because it will try to link system libraries (x86) to my mips compiled stuff.

Does anyone knows how to solve it?

Thanks very much.

Answer 1

Here is how I would approach debugging this problem: Run

strace -o makelog -f -ff -v -s 9000 make

This will create makelog.<pid> files for all processes run during compilation. With the options given they will contain a complete list of environment variables, so you should first of all be able to follow PKG_CONFIG_PATH and see if/where it changes. You can also find things like if /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig is read from some configuration file or not for instance.