Comment 5 for bug 1161064

Daniel, It doesn't force you to use pkg-config to use the Mir libraries, this is just the easiest method. Note of course you can just do a -I/usr/include/mirclient -I/usr/include/mircommon yourself and it would work fine.

The fact is the old style /usr/include/foo just doesn't hold up to modern requirements (i.e. versioning of libraries).