The pkg-config program retrieves information about installed libraries, usually for the purposes of compiling against and linking to them. ExtUtils::PkgConfig is a very simplistic interface to this utility, intended for use in the Makefile.PL of perl extensions which bind libraries that pkg-config knows. It is really just boilerplate code that you would've written yourself. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/ExtUtils-PkgConfig/