Why in the world would you want to do such a thing, you don't need pkgconfig for make to function. pkgconfig should be a makedepend for every package that needs pkgconfig to build, which happens to be almost every autotools using program in this case.

But many packages don't have such line in their PKGBUILD, so that's the actual problem. Maybe we could find a better way to do with it.

Then that package has a bug. I add it to every package when I get to update it.

What, do you add 'gcc' and 'make' and 'automake' and 'autoconf' to every pkgbuild too?!

A clean, simple solution is to just add 'pkgconfig' as a depend of 'make', problem solved. I don't see why this is such an issue. The package is 50K compressed, and ~150K uncompressed. Almost every single package that uses autotools uses pkg-config as well, so what could possibly be the harm in this?

As far as I can tell, this is something that is 100% obvious. Why is there such resistence to doing this? It should have been fixed AGES ago, seeing that it's been brought up more than once before.

Sounds a little hackish, How about make "pkgconfig" as a base install (a clean gnome environment doesn't have pkgconfig installed) like "make" (make is not required by any packages too), then change the "wrong" PKGBUILDS.

imho this isn't really a bug.
if we add pkgconfig, we also needs to add intltool and possible more, runtime deps are the biggest problem.
i prefere to see a bug report with a list which packages are missing these ? the problem for us is that we do not see them through an namcap or checkpkg. So it is way harder to fix compile time depends.

I agree with Shadowhand here.
pkgconfig (and other tools) belong somewhere - if it is as a makedepends=() entry, we're also going to have to add gcc, glibc, and many other things as makedepends to be complete. It will also be a ridiculous amount of packages that need 5-10 entries added to makedepends. There's a point where the excess verbosity is just not necessary.

In the past week or so, I have run across a number of new arch users, who try to use the AUR, and immediately get failures, because pkgconfig is not installed. These AUR packages will also need pkgconfig added to makedepends, which is nearly impossible to enforce.

Adding pkgconfig as a depend of something like make, or gcc, or something, will just make the lives of new users easier. I think, regardless of anything else, this fact should be important.

after a bit of thinking it would be nice to have these make deps added to "base" in the installer.

That is what I recommended, if by default we install pkgconfig, that's OK for most of cases.

Aye, I would agree as well. The main reason for this is tha pkg-config is needed for alot of things and not installed by default.

moved in to base