Will acknowledge this may be more of a meson question and less of a DPDK issue but things didn't seem to work as expected and had to tweak the config/meson.build to want to start with the DPDK team.

Our project is cmake based and we use fetch content to pull in our external dependencies (eg dpdk, libarchive, etc).  We recently noticed (rediscovered) that DPDK was not linking libarchive which causes the OS provided DDP for the Intel ICE based cards to be unable to be decompressed.  Previously we had some additional items installed that provided an uncompressed DDP file.  As our project already builds libarchive we did not want to install it at the os level for inclusion into DPDK as we may now be mixing versions within our application.

In our cmake we added -Dpkg_config_path to help meson find our libarchive build (it is not installed as it is statically linked into our app).  This worked but did not expose the include and link directories or any libs that may also need to be linked from the pc file.  We had to make some changes to get those added and allow things to compile cleanly.  I can confirm the changes here work but feel they should not have been necessary.

What is the correct way to link/use a custom libarchive (or any dependency for that matter) with DPDK?  I've attached the diff for the meson changes plus the generated pc file for libarchive that we are telling meson to find with the pkg_config_path parameter.

---

```

diff --git a/config/meson.build b/config/meson.build
index 6d9ffd4f4b..3942b3e1dc 100644
--- a/config/meson.build
+++ b/config/meson.build
@@ -207,11 +207,21 @@ endif
 
 libarchive = dependency('libarchive', required: false, method: 'pkg-config')
 if libarchive.found()
+    link_libs = libarchive.get_pkgconfig_variable('tc_link_libs').split()
+    libarchive_link_libs = []
+    foreach lib : link_libs
+      if lib.startswith('-l')
+        libarchive_link_libs += lib
+      endif
+    endforeach
+
     dpdk_conf.set('RTE_HAS_LIBARCHIVE', 1)
     # Push libarchive link dependency at the project level to support
     # statically linking dpdk apps. Details at:
     # https://inbox.dpdk.org/dev/20210605004024.660267a1@sovereign/
-    add_project_link_arguments('-larchive', language: 'c')
+    add_project_link_arguments('-larchive', '-L@0@'.format(libarchive.get_pkgconfig_variable('libdir')), libarchive_link_libs, language: 'c')
+
+    add_project_arguments('-I@0@'.format(libarchive.get_pkgconfig_variable('includedir')), language: 'c')
     dpdk_extra_ldflags += '-larchive'
 endif

```

----

some paths have been altered to hide user/application info

```

prefix=/opt/vendor/debug-trace
exec_prefix=${prefix}
libdir=/home/user/bitbucket/app/build/lib
includedir=/home/user/bitbucket/app/build/_deps/libarchive-src/libarchive
tc_link_libs=" -lz -lbz2 -llzma -llzo2 -llz4 -lnettle -lcrypto -lxml2 -lxml2 -lz -llzma -lm"

Name: libarchive
Description: library that can create and read several streaming archive formats
Version: 3.7.2
Cflags: -I${includedir}
Cflags.private: -DLIBARCHIVE_STATIC
Libs: -L${libdir} -larchive
Libs.private:  -lz -lbz2 -llzma -llzo2 -llz4 -lnettle -lcrypto -lxml2 -lxml2 -lz -llzma -lm
Requires.private:
```