🚀 Feature

A typical install oflibtorch should come with apkg-config file, describing how to build code relying on libtorch headers and how to link to libtorch libraries.

Motivation

Users oflibtorch right now must resort to major hacks in order to correctly buildtorch-dependent code or link tolibtorch, compared to most other native libraries.

Pitch

pkg-config is the standard and conventional mechanism to provide dependency information and linkage/build instructions on UNIX systems (with maybe an exception of macs).

Alternatives

People continue to hack around lack of the standard/blessed dependency discovery using the horror known as environment variables. Building any code successfully requires one to always remember to set this environment variable up.

They might also manually hardcode the dependency information into their build tooling. And then suffer breakage or and/or continue using irrelevant dependencies once the dependencies of torch itself change.

Additional context

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pkg-config
Tensorflow has this since 2017

cc@malfet@seemethere@walterddr