Consider the case where someone creates a tarball archive of your project rather than installing directly from the build tree (e.g.via cmake --install
). They might unpack that tarball anywhere, which is both a desirable capability and common practice. In that scenario, you can’t hard-code the absolute path of the install location in the .pc file.
Perhaps a better solution might be to define your prefix=...
line in terms of the ${pcfiledir}
variable, something like prefix=${pcfiledir}/../..
. The following link might be helpful: