AK's weblog

Rejected.
(a) Mentioned libraries are installed in system-wide directories by definition.
(b) When a user is capable installing it outside of the usual system-wide directories, he's also capable of adapting the Makefile accordingly.
(c) IMHO, it's very unlikely that somebody installs the library somewhere outside of a system-wide directory, but then takes care that the according .pc files are installed when pkg-config is searching for it.

A great example for the utter failure of pkg-config is how it fails to work with libraries that are installed via Fink on Mac OS X. Fink installs all its software under /sw, which is definitely not one of the "usual" prefixes such as /usr and /usr/local. And of course, the pkg-config that is delivered with Mac OS X fails to find any of the .pc file that are installed under /sw. When using the pkg-config that is delivered with Fink, the .pc files that are installed under /usr aren't found. In theory, pkg-config is great, but in practise, it's absolutely awful and IMHO less reliable than not using any semi-magic auto-detection mechanism.

Additionally, it depends on glib2, and I'm not going to endorse the installation of a plethora of bloated software that is of no direct use to users of newsbeuter.