Argh! No wait, I am a dufus. A noinst_LTLIBRARY is always a convenience library, whereas a pkglib_LTLIBRARY is affected by configure --disable-shared etc. Even if you somehow got past the syntax problems, the semantics are all wrong anyhow.
I'm not sure I follow all of that, but OK.
The only way I can think of doing this is with an install-exec-hook that removes installed libraries if INSTALL_LIBS was not set:
if !INSTALL_LIBS install-exec-hook: $(MAKE) $(AM_MAKEFLAGS) uninstall-pkglibLTLIBRARIES endif
But this depends on an undocumented target. Better to put the modules in a separate dir with their own Makefile.am, and call that Makefile's uninstall rule in the same way.
Yuck... that means my users will see the libtool --mode=install messages and ldconfig runs for all 30+ modules, then they'll all get removed. For now I think I can live with the files getting installed and the users just knowing that they're not necessary for the application to be used.
