I completely missed that so thanks for pointing it out.

On the CentOS environment I don't have an easy way to update it right now so I switched over to another host and am seeing similar behavior.  The major deltas are listed below.

OS: Ubuntu 21.10
meson: 0.56.2
pkg-config: 0.29.2 (+ 1.7.3 via pkgconf)
gcc: 11.2.0

On Mon, May 23, 2022 at 4:20 AM Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 20, 2022 at 10:35:07PM -0400, Ben Magistro wrote:
>    I've been working through some updates to the build system for TLDK and
>    have been working through the different variants (system vs fallback +
>    shared vs static).  I've been able to successfully build and run the
>    unit test app for most of these combinations however, I haven't been
>    able to get the system static combination to work successfully yet,
>    OS: CentOS 7.9 + devtoolset-9 (gcc 9.3.1)
>    DPDK: 21.11
>    I built DPDK using `meson build` + `ninja -C build` using default
>    options and installed using `ninja -C build install`.
>    When configuring TLDK, I get an error indicating the static libraries
>    cannot be found.  I'm still investigating this, but could use some
>    assistance.  I wouldn't rule out an issue in the meson files for TLDK.
>    [bmagistro@lvdi-01 tldk-system-static]$ meson build
>    -Dpkg_config_path=/usr/local/lib64/pkgconfig
>    The Meson build system
>    Version: 0.55.1
>    Source dir: /home/bmagistro/github/tldk-system-static
>    Build dir: /home/bmagistro/github/tldk-system-static/build
>    Build type: native build
>    Program cat found: YES
>    Project name: TLDK
>    Project version: 21.11.0
>    C compiler for the host machine: cc (gcc 9.3.1 "cc (GCC) 9.3.1 20200408
>    (Red Hat 9.3.1-2)")
>    C linker for the host machine: cc ld.bfd 2.32-16
>    C++ compiler for the host machine: c++ (gcc 9.3.1 "c++ (GCC) 9.3.1
>    20200408 (Red Hat 9.3.1-2)")
>    C++ linker for the host machine: c++ ld.bfd 2.32-16
>    Host machine cpu family: x86_64
>    Host machine cpu: x86_64
>    Message: ## Building in Developer Mode ##
>    Found pkg-config: /usr/bin/pkg-config (0.27.1)

Can you try installing a newer version of pkg-config or pkgconf. We have
previously encountered issues with the version of pkg-config installed on
RHEL 7 and Centos 7. It does some reordering of arguments and flags
that can break things under certain circumstances. See:

https://doc.dpdk.org/guides-21.11/linux_gsg/sys_reqs.html#building-dpdk-applications

/Bruce