Slightly off-topic; One thing pkg-config really needs added is a .pc syntax to say when static linking is unsupported by the package as-installed, which results in `pkg-config --static` invocations for the package returning EXIT_FAILURE so attempts to do so clearly fail without wasting peoples' time.

Some distros have been deliberately breaking static linking, but the .pc files and pkg-config on those systems continue to mislead build processes into attempting static builds. Arch in particular has started just silently omitting .a files, even for libraries that have no problem with static linking. It's infuriating if you don't know they've done this and are trusting `pkg-config --static` to Just Work. Arch should be able to stick something in the .pc files for when they've omitted the .a file. As-is it's just producing a broken development environment.