libcircle-3.0 :: configure does not detect pkg-config

[EricDeveaud]

Hello,

working from https://github.com/hpc/libcircle/releases/download/v0.3/libcircle-0.3.0.tar.gz

after running autogen.sh

module load openmpi/4.0.2 gcc/9.2.0 pkg-config/0.29.2

I tried to run ./configure and got

[gensoft@e211aa82115c libcircle-0.3.0]$ ./configure 
checking for a BSD-compatible install... /usr/bin/install -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking for a thread-safe mkdir -p... /usr/bin/mkdir -p
checking for gawk... gawk
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... yes
checking whether make supports nested variables... yes
checking whether make supports nested variables... (cached) yes
checking for gcc... gcc
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking whether we are cross compiling... no
checking for suffix of object files... o
checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes
checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes
checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed
checking whether gcc understands -c and -o together... yes
checking whether make supports the include directive... yes (GNU style)
checking dependency style of gcc... gcc3
checking for pkg-config... yes
configure: error: *** Libcircle requires the pkg-config macros to be available!

problem does not arise whith version 0.2.1-rc.1
if I grab configure.ac from 0.2.1-rc1, edit Makefile.am to remove "unit tests if we found libcheck"
run ./autogen.sh
configure runs fine

regards

Eric