pkg-config causes debug libraries to be linked in release builds

[dsvensson]

For example:

pkg_check_modules(PNG REQUIRED IMPORTED_TARGET libpng)

With Visual Studio or Ninja Multi-Config, this leads to the debug version being linked. Not sure if it's because the pkg_check_modules doesn't set the _RELEASE and _DEBUG variants of the variables and thus overwrites each other, but the question remains. How should this be handled?

Bug in vcpkg? Bug in cmake? An annoying inconvenience with a workaround?

The vcpkg_pkgconfig_get_modules port seems to do something in this direction, but I haven't figured out if it can be used for regular builds or if it's just a ports helper.

[dg0yt]

Plain CMake FindPkgConfig doesn't support multi-config, basically because plain pkg-config doesn't support multi-config.

It would be possible to do per-config searches and to combine the result, maybe even in a convenient wrapper.

[moratom]

@dsvensson did you figure something out? It seems to me that a lot of ports suffer from linking to release versions of the library