inter-library dependencies

[Evan Martin <martine cs washington edu>]

I'm a little confused about inter-library dependencies.  Some pages I
read claim that some platforms will not figure out that GTK's libraries
internally use (for example) the X libraries, and so the X libraries
need to be included on the linker command line for an executable that
uses GTK.

Yet pkg-config --libs gtk+-2.0 on my machine does not include the X
libraries on the command line.  How does this work on those platforms
that don't allow chained dependencies?  Does gtk generate a different
.pc file on those platforms?  Does pkg-config handle this somehow?

-- 
      Evan Martin
martine cs washington edu
  http://neugierig.org