That is an interesting approach. Since "we" have the ability to patch things at various stages of a build ,pre-fetch to post-install, the .pc files could be "tweaked" as we choose.From your experiences, which packages might be good candidates for .pcfile modification?
Last I checked, all of them that include -L arguments. _None_ of them set rpath. I just grep'd for '-L' in the pkgconfig dirs and used a simple perl script to modify them. That was a while ago, though - it was so much work I just changed my build env to set LD_RUN_PATH, which (on Solaris) Just Works.
But then I'm a firm believer that $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is Evil. -- Carson