Default found pkg-config is broken on windows MSVC

[mrobertseidowsky-gpsw]

Describe the bug
Since meson version 0.60, the default pkg-config found automatically by meson on windows with visual studio backend is broken and thus made the CI of my project failed.

• meson 0.59: Found pkg-config: C:\Strawberry\perl\bin\pkg-config.BAT (0.26) => OK
• meson 0.60: found pkg-config 'C:\\Strawberry\\perl\\bin\\pkg-config.BAT' but it is Strawberry Perl and thus broken. Ignoring... => KO

To Reproduce
See: https://github.com/Stupeflix/sxplayer/blob/master/meson.build
And associated CI workflow: https://github.com/Stupeflix/sxplayer/blob/master/.github/workflows/ci_win.yml

Expected behavior
I expected the same behaviour of meson from 0.59 to 0.60 or an info into the changelog.

Fix
Fix is to get pkgconf sources, built it for windows, rename the pkgconf.exe generated binary to pkg-config.exe then make it ingested by meson throught PATH variable.
See PR: Stupeflix/sxplayer#43

system parameters

• It's a plain native build for windows
• OS: Windows 10
• python 3.10
• meson 0.60

[xclaesse]

This is intentional, pkg-config from perl is broken and causes tones of issues. If you need pkg-config you need to install it yourself in msys for example.

[eli-schwartz]

This was changed in #9384 which explains the rationale for the change. Note that Strawberry Perl is generally installed by accident, not by people who were looking for a pkg-config program... and it causes a number of dependencies to be successfully detected by meson, but then fail to build with ninja due to missing headers and link flags.

The pkg-config in question is only supposed to ever be used together with the GCC which is also provided by Strawberry Perl, and it is quite doubtful you (or anyone) was doing that.

I expected the same behaviour of meson from 0.59 to 0.60 or an info into the changelog.

It's neither a breaking change, nor a noteworthy one.