Similar questions may have been asked before, but not always with a satisfatory answer IMHO.
I want to check for a certain library. E.g. I would use something like AC_ARC_WITH(foo, [ --with-foo[=PREFIX] .... ] ...) where PREFIX is used to search for libfoo in PREFIX/lib, and related headers in PREFIX/include. If these directories exist, I can modify CPPFLAGS/LDFLAGS accordingly, proceed with AC_CHECK_LIB(foo,func...), and so on. However, this often fails with shared libraries. E.g. on Solaris < 8, there is no way to configure the dynamic linker to search non-standard locations (or there was a conscious decision to not add the library location to ld.so's search path; that's why --with-foo accepts a path argument). One either has to specify appropriate LDFLAGS in the environment, or hardcode -R/rpath into configure. The former requires that the user has sufficient knowledge to supply the correct LDFLAGS, the latter requires a lot of effort on the maintainer's side to keep configure portable across platforms. Most packages I checked roll their own code for this (php-4.x/aclocal.m4 makes interesting reading ;-). But I was wondering whether it is possible to use libtool for such library checks, as it already has all the system-specific information about linker flags etc. Has anyone considered or even tried this before? It is a bit different from library/convenience library creation. Environment: autoconf 2.54/automake 1.7.1/libtool 1.4.2 (yes, I have seen the light, for a new project anyhow :)
