Comment (by Steven R. Brandt):

Does homebrew not set up pkg-config? Is pkg-config absent? I found that if a pkg-config command is not in the path, HDF5 counts that as a failure to find something in the pkg-config path.

I'm thinking that it might be useful to have simfactory (or maybe even the Makefile) stop and print out an error message if pkg-config, which, xargs, or hostname are not present, or if USER or HOME are not set. All these sorts of things can cause problems.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2235/externallibraries-hdf5-fails-to-correctly