From @krakjoe

is there any possibility to add pkg-config integration into the pie dependency resolver, it's quite typical for an extension to itself depend on some system/3rd party library, and the modern way extensions check for that library is with pkg-config ... we can't obviously actually install the dependencies (or maybe we could, I'm not sure), but we can at least detect why the build would fail before attempting it - often make output is confusing for people to read that are not used to reading make output, whereas "This build will fail because pkg-config says X" before make is ever invoked can't be missed/misunderstood