Give a sensible error when pkg-config is not installed?

[karolyi]

Coming from yaml/pyyaml#618, your package bails out hard when the pkg-config binary is not present on the system, which can be a case.

Could you please provide some preliminary checks and maybe a custom exception for that, please?

[matze]

Could you please provide some preliminary checks and maybe a custom exception for that, please?

There are checks and in case the binary is not found, EnvironmentError is thrown. What else do you expect? Since this is a library it is expected that users handle potential exceptions.

[karolyi]

I see. The traceback I saw was somewhat convoluted for me, hence I thought it's not handled correctly.

Also, from the EnvironmentError documentation:

The following exceptions are kept for compatibility with previous versions; starting from Python 3.3, they are aliases of OSError.

[karolyi]

Not sure where you raise an "original OSError" (stated in the changelog), but you might want to use a different error instead of EnvironmentError, if the two aren't the same?