Lua and pkg-config .pc file

["Alex T." <dioxinu@...>]

Hello guys,

I have a question regarding .pc file for Lua. I know this has already been discussed before here and back in 2008 here, but it seems to me that the problem hasn't been solved. The problem I'm having right now is that my application uses Lua and is going to be compiled on different distros. What I noticed that different distributions call .pc file differently.
So, my question to Lua users is, how do you search for lua? Do you try every possible .pc file (lua.pc, lua-5.1.pc, lua5.1.pc) available on the system until you match one?
Another question is, does anyone link to the static Lua library? If yes, how do you find it without .pc file? The solution that may work here is just to run find on /usr, but it just doesn't look right.
With Lua 5.1 we had at least minimal .pc file that could be used for shared library linking, but from what I see Lua 5.2 drops .pc completely. There is no guarantee that every single package maintainer will provide a proper .pc file for Lua which makes everybody's build script less portable.
If Lua developers are here, could you explain what is wrong with having .pc file with the source code and installing it, instead of making package maintainers to provide it? I think this is a limitation for Lua users.

Thanks.

Sincerely, Alex.